Ana Vlaiculescu & William O’Brien Jr

Ana Vlaiculescu is an emerging architectural designer whose work moves between architectural practice, research, and acts of cultural production. She graduated from the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest, where she completed both her Bachelor and Master of Architecture degrees. Her diploma project was selected for the Best Diploma Show in Bucharest. Her academic path includes an exchange semester at UdA in Italy, Chieti-Pescara, as well as participation in international workshops such as Porto Academy and Porto Academy Visiting USI-Arc Mendrisio. She has worked in Berlin with Mensing Timofticiuc Architekten and had an ongoing collaboration with Zeia Studio, in Bucharest.

William O’Brien Jr. is Founder and Principal of WOJR and Director of the Master of Architecture Program at MIT, where he is an Associate Professor. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture awarded by the American Academy in Rome. He was awarded the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers. He has taught previously at University of California Berkeley as the Bernard Maybeck Fellow and was the LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at The Ohio State University. Before joining MIT, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught advanced theory seminars and design studios in the graduate curriculum. O’Brien pursued his graduate studies at Harvard GSD where he was the recipient of the Department of Architecture Faculty Design Award. He has been named a Fellow by MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and a Socrates Fellow by the Aspen Institute.