Anya Sirota

Anya Sirota is an architectural designer, curator, and professor of architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. She is the founding principal of Akoaki, an award-winning architecture and urban design practice that approaches architecture as both a spatial and cultural practice. Working across buildings, installations, public spaces, and urban frameworks, Sirota examines how design participates in the production of collective life. 

This inquiry extends from the scale of the object to that of the city. Sirota currently provides design leadership for the Detroit Cultural District Guiding Plan, an 83-acre framework that reimagines the public realm shared by twelve cultural institutions. Developed with Agence Ter, the plan has received the Architizer Vision Award for public space, the Plan Award for public space design, and an Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design merit award. Her work has been exhibited at the Vitra Design Museum, Design Museum Brussels, Centro Pecci, and the Saint-Étienne International Design Biennale. 

Her research and curatorial work consider architecture as one of the instruments through which public culture is produced, contested, and represented. She is co-curator of 13 White Houses, an international exhibition and publication that assembles competing architectural propositions to reconsider the political and symbolic life of the White House. She is also co-editor, with Suzanne Lettieri, of Junior Architects (Park Books, 2026), which positions design education for young people as both a civic undertaking and a disciplinary proposition. 

Sirota received the Architectural League Prize and the ACSA Faculty Design Award. She holds a master of architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she received the Araldo Cossutta Prize for Design Excellence, and a bachelor of arts in modern culture and media from Brown University.