Emily Kutil

Emily Kutil is a Detroit-based designer, researcher and educator. She is currently a lecturer in Architecture at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the 2022-2023 Brown-Forman Visiting Chair in Urban Design at the University of Kentucky College of Design.

Emily’s research investigates the intertwined social structures, material structures, and power structures that shape our world. She makes drawings, publications, installations, models, and other story-machines, often using collective, interdisciplinary processes. Emily is a co-founder of We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective, a collaboration between community activists, academics, and designers mapping geographies of austerity in Detroit. Her project Black Bottom Street View, an immersive representation of a historic Detroit neighborhood destroyed during urban renewal, was awarded the Great Places Award for Place Art in 2022 and a Knight Arts Challenge Grant in 2016. Emily’s current research includes a collaborative analysis of misconduct within the Detroit Police Department and an investigation of Great Lakes water and energy infrastructures and their entanglements with land, life, and systems of power.

Previously, Emily was an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Lawrence Technological University and the 2019-2020 Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo. She holds a BSArch from the University of Cincinnati and a MArch with High Distinction and Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan.