Ersela Kripa

In addition to her role as vice provost for Outreach & Engagement, Ersela Kripa is a professor and the director of Texas Tech Huckabee College of Architecture – El Paso. She also serves as the director of projects at the Project for Operative Spatial Technologies research center.

Ersela is a registered architect and founding partner of AGENCY. Her awards include the Rome Prize in Architecture, the Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Emerging Voices award from The Architectural League of New York, the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and a MacDowell fellowship, among others.

Ersela has a master’s degree in advanced architectural design from Columbia University, where she is often invited to teach. Born and raised under a communist dictatorship in Albania, Ersela’s work is particularly focused on uncovering the machinations of the securocratic regimes that surveil and control public lives.

Her practice, AGENCY Architecture LLC, is a design and research practice located on the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work engages emerging publics in protracted, conflictual contexts by consistently shifting the narrative, developing methods to identify, appropriate and subvert subperceptual urban and atmospheric phenomena that violate human rights. AGENCY’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Hong Kong–Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism, the Venice Biennale, the Berlin Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and the Richmond Art Center.