Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities

Ana Ozaki’s fellowship is made possible through the support of the Mellon Foundation.

Ozaki's research interests include colonial and modern architectures; Latin American, African Diaspora, postcolonial, and feminist studies; as well as the intersections between architecture and the fields of art history, human geography, and anthropology. Besides writing, Ozaki is fascinated by the public discussion of social issues central to architecture historiography in the form of exhibitions and public events. More specifically, Ozaki investigates the entanglements between ideologies of race and environment in what she calls the Brazilian Atlantic.

Her dissertation, "’New Brazils’ in Africa: Transatlantic Tropical Futurities, Racial Miscegenation, and Plantation Legacies, 1910-1974," confronts the inadequacies of area studies that disregard Brazil's historical transatlantic connections to Africa. Centered on Brazil's construction of an architectural ideal for the rest of the tropics, her dissertation investigates the complex ways race has interfered in architectural understandings of climate in Brazil and its 20th-century translations in Nigeria, Angola, and Mozambique. Ozaki’s research has been supported by Cornell’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, fellowships from the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development Program, Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, and the German Academic Exchange Service’s (DAAD).

Ozaki participated in the transnational Ignis Mutat Res research project, funded by the French government, as well as in local urban design projects, exhibitions, and public education programs in collaboration with the Niehoff Urban Studio and the Over-the-Rhine foundation in Cincinnati. Working as a licensed architect in Brazil, Ozaki was also involved in institutional and residential scaled projects in Brazil and Angola. Ozaki holds a B.Arch. and a BFA from Parana’s Federal University and the School of Music and Fine Arts, respectively, and an MSc Arch and an MCP from the University of Cincinnati. Ozaki has taught architectural history, theory, and design courses at the Universidade Positivo in Brazil, the University of Cincinnati, Barnard College and Columbia University, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and UCLA.

In Fall 2022, she will co-teach the Interdisciplinary Design Studio [ARC 205/URB 205/LAS 225/ENV 205] with Prof. Mario I. Gandelsonas, which focuses on social forces that shape design thinking.