Faculty appointments

The Yale School of Architecture is honored to announce three faculty appointments that started in fall 2023. Ana María Durán Calisto has been appointed the Daniel Rose (1951) Visiting Assistant Professor and David Bijan Sadighian and Ife Salema Vanable have been appointed Assistant Professors.  

“Our newest colleagues will strengthen our scholarship and our mission to educate the future leaders of architecture and design,” said Dean Deborah Berke. “Each of them helps broaden the geographical and cultural contexts of our curriculum. I am thrilled they have joined the faculty.” 

Both Durán Calisto and Vanable joined the faculty prior to their most recent appointments: Durán Calisto has taught as Critic since Spring 2020 and Vanable has taught first as KPF Visiting Scholar in Fall 2021 and then as Presidential Visiting Fellow through Spring 2023. 

The Daniel Rose (1951) Visiting Assistant Professorship was established in 2007 by Joseph Rose and Gideon Rose in honor of their father; previous holders of the position include Elihu Rubin, Todd Reisz, Jesse Le Cavalier, and Anthony Acciavatti.

Ana María Durán Calisto is a designer, planner and scholar from Quito, Ecuador. In 2002, she co-founded Estudio A0 with Jaskran Kalirai. The firm's work has been widely recognized: Estudio A0 won the SDSN-Amazon Prize at COP21 in Paris and its work has been featured in the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale and in many other exhibitions. Durán Calisto has taught research seminars and design studios at many institutions before coming to Yale including the at the Catholic University of Ecuador, Harvard University, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, the Catholic University of Temuco, and at UCLA. In 2022, Durán Calisto received the Mark Cousins Theory Award for her work on extractivism and the built environment and her interest in the principles of ancestral urban ecologies. She has co-edited the books Ecological Urbanism in Latin America (2019), Beyond Petropolis: Designing a Practical Utopia in Nueva Loja (2015), and IV Taller Internacional de Vivienda Popular (2007). She has contributed chapters to the books Adaptive Reuse in Latin America: Cultural Identity, Values and Memory (2023), Roadside Picnics (2022), A Line in the Andes (2014), Modernism and Contemporary Art in Latin America (2014), Extreme Urbanism 1 (2011), Restructuring from Within (2007), and Thinking Practice (2007). She co-authored the Toward Re-Entanglement: A Charter for the City and the Earth (Bauhaus Earth, 2022). She curated the 15th Panamerican Architecture Biennial of Quito: Visible Cities (2006) and was National Curator for the IX BIAU. Durán Calisto is a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, convened by SDSN and the United Nations, and co-authored its report chapter on urbanization. She completed a Loeb Fellowship on the infrastructural integration of South America. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the urban planning department at UCLA. Under the advice of Susanna Hecht, she is writing a dissertation on the urban history of Amazonia, with a focus on indigenous systems of territorial planning and colonial disruptions. 

David Bijan Sadighian researches and teaches the history of architecture, infrastructure, and material culture in the Atlantic World since the eighteenth century. His work situates the history of design at the nexus of empire, migration, capitalism, and political thought, bridging the disciplines of art and architectural history with global history, sociology, and related fields. His current book project, The World is a Composition: Beaux-Arts Design and Internationalism in the Age of Empire, examines how methods of architectural composition contributed to the rise of international order during the height of European colonial expansion (c. 1870–1930). Prior to his faculty appointment at Yale, David was selected as a 2022–23 Ahmanson-Getty Fellow at UCLA, where he conducted research and fieldwork on informal building practices by fugitive slaves in pre-abolition Brazil and the legacy of insurgent architecture in present-day struggles for Black and Indigenous land sovereignty. Sadighian’s work has received the support of grants and fellowships from the Graham Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the American Historical Association (AHA), and the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (DFK Paris), among other institutions. Before starting his doctoral studies in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard (PhD, 2023), he was a Collection Specialist in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

Ife Salema Vanable is an architect, historian, and theorist who directs i/van/able, a Bronx-based architectural workshop and think tank that produces theoretical, speculative, and physical interventions that defy prevailing notions of type, taste, and form. This work has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, recognized by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and exhibited at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. Vanable holds professional and post-professional degrees in architecture from Cornell and Princeton Universities and has studied at the Architectural Association in London and the University College of Lands and Architectural Studies (now Ardhi University) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Ife was the inaugural KPF Visiting Scholar at the Yale School of Architecture and is a Ph.D. candidate in architectural history and theory at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). Her scholarly work asks questions of and seeks to unearth complex and seemingly banal relationships between the design of architecture, law, and public policy, the performance of domesticity and respectability, and the politics, aesthetics, and materiality of the making of home. She has received numerous awards, prizes, and fellowships, including a History and Theory Prize from Princeton University, a Columbia University Buell Center Fellowship, and an inaugural Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) Prize. Vanable's writing has been published in the Avery Review and she is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Black Production and the Space of the University. Ife has taught at The Cooper Union, Columbia University, and the Yale School of Architecture.