Biography
Oana Stanescu is a Romanian-born designer, curator, and educator whose work spans architecture, design, and cultural production at all scales — from public infrastructure to installations, products, exhibitions, and pedagogical models. Her practice is defined by a commitment to experimentation, criticality, and collaboration, bringing together disciplines and voices across art, architecture, fashion, and academia.
After graduating in Timi?oara and becoming a registered architect in Romania, Stanescu established her eponymous studio following formative international collaborations, including co-leading the celebrated New York–based firm Family. Her work quickly gained visibility for its conceptual clarity and material innovation, leading to high-profile partnerships across North America, Europe, and Asia. A central aspect of her practice has been self-initiated projects such as the Funicular — an industrial vestige in her hometown of Reschitza, currently being rehabilitated into public space under the New European Bauhaus project — and the +POOL, a collaborative project for the world’s first water-filtering, floating swimming pool in New York.
Her close creative relationships with figures such as Virgil Abloh have contributed to some of the most influential cultural expressions of the past decade. With Abloh, Stanescu worked on projects that blurred boundaries between architecture, fashion, and performance, including collaborative design research that challenged disciplinary conventions.
In 2024, Stanescu curated the Beta Biennial in Timi?oara under the title "cover me softly." The exhibition explored the concept of the "cover" (borrowed from music) as a model for contemporary creation, questioning traditional notions of originality, authorship, and intellectual property while seeking new vocabularies for cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange. Her studio has also completed work for institutions such as the New Museum and Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Her designs have been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, and Harvard GSD.
Stanescu’s teaching experience spans over a decade at institutions including MIT, Harvard, EPFL, and the Architectural Association. Most recently, she was appointed the S. Charles Lee Chair in Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. Since March 2026, she has led the Spatial Design program at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU), where she continues to develop new approaches to design pedagogy that emphasize interdisciplinarity, agency, and global connectivity.
Prof. Arch.
Leitung Studienrichtung Spatial Design
