Dana Cupkova

Dana Cupkova holds associate professorship at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture and is a co-founder and director of EPIPHYTE Lab, an architectural design and research collaborative. From 2005 to 2012 she was a visiting assistant professor in the Cornell University Department of Architecture. From 2014 to 2018 she served on the ACADIA Board of Directors and currently she is on the Editorial Board for the IJAC. Cupkova is track chair of SoA’s Masters of Science in Sustainable Design (MSSD) program.

Cupkova’s design work engages the built environment at the intersection of ecology, computationally driven processes, and systems analysis. In her research, she interrogates the relationship between design-space and ecology as it engages computational methods, thermodynamic processes, and experimentation with geometrically driven performance logic. Her work has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, the AIA NY Center for Architecture Foundation, the Cornell University Faculty Innovation in Teaching Grant, the Architectural League of New York, the AIA Urban and Regional Solution Grant, the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance Grant, CMU’s Manufacturing Futures Infinitive and others. Cupkova’s design work has been published internationally in professional venues such as Dwell, The Architectural Review, Green Building & Design, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Architect's Newspaper, International Journal of Architectural Computing and presented at many academic conferences. In May 2018 Epiphyte Lab has been recognized as the Next Progressives design practice by ARCHITECT Magazine, the Journal of The American Institute of Architects.

Cupkova teaches in the core design curriculum, serving as a coordinator for the undergraduate and graduate core design studio Environment, Form and Feedback, as well teaching advanced option studios, graduate design-research MSSD thesis and graduate-level research seminars.

Cupkova received the professional degree of Engineer Architect from the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Design at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava; she completed her thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and holds a Master of Architecture degree from the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA, where she was awarded the Unrestricted University Fellowship, the Mimi Perloff Award, and the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship for outstanding design work. Cupkova was a founder and design director of DCm-STUDIO, an architectural design practice in New York City, and has extensive international professional experience in Europe, the United States, and Southeast Asia. She was previously in practice with Smith-Miller+Hawkinson Architects, RUR Architecture in New York City, and TR Hamzah & Yeang in Malaysia.