Keith Mitnick

Keith Mitnick is Associate Professor of Architecture at The University of Michigan where he held the 2000 Sanders Fellowship in Architecture. Prior to coming to Michigan he taught at The University of California, Berkeley and is a founder of the design practice Mitnick Roddier. He has received numerous design and research awards including two Graham Foundation grants and The Burnham Prize Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome in 2003.

The work of Mitnick Roddier has been featured as part of the Emerging Practices series in Architectural Record as well as the On the Boards series in Architecture Magazine, and has been exhibited in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris. The firm has received numerous awards including the 2004 Young Architects Forum award from the Architectural League of New York, The Unbuilt Architecture award from the Boston Society of Architects, and the ACSA Faculty Design Award. Their Split/View pavilion is on permanent exhibition on the grounds of the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was included in the publication XS Green: Big Ideas, Small Buildings. Mitnick Roddier were among ten international firms selected to receive the 2005 Architectural Record Design Vanguard award.

Mitnick’s first book, Artificial Light, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2008, and he has published numerous excerpts from an ongoing writing project titled Rainy Sea, a novel that uses fiction writing to contemplate spatial concepts and architectural ideas. His essays and creative work have appeared in such publications as LOG, Praxis, Thresholds, and Harvard Design Magazine, and design work with Roddier has been published in MONU Magazine and exhibited at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City.  Mitnick was the recipient of the 2010 and 2018 Faculty Fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities, and has been a Senior Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows.

Recently, essays and creative fiction has been published in Praxis Journal, MIT’s Threshold Journal, and an edited book collection called Made Up, published by Actar Press. In 2020, his short story, “The Architect who Couldn’t Write,” was included in a book titled Ficto-Critical Approaches to a Writing Architecture edited for Bloomsbury Architecture Series.

In 2022 Mitnick was awarded the Rome Prize Fellowship at The American Academy. In 2023 he was awarded the Donna Salzar Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award. Most recently he has completed Fog Lines, a book of stories and photographs, to be published in 2024 by Little Steidl Publisher, Gottingen, Germany.