Virginia San Fratello
Master of Architecture, Columbia University
Bachelor of Environmental Design, North Carolina State University
Email: virginia.sanfratello@sjsu.edu
Websites:
https://www.rael-sanfratello.com
Professor San Fratello is the Chair of the Department of Design in the College of Humanities & Arts. She is the 2025 winner of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Award for Digital Design, an International Interior Design Association Educator of the Year recipient and was the winner of the Beazley Design of the Year award in 2020. Her creative practice, Rael San Fratello, was named an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York—one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture and in 2016 Rael San Fratello was also awarded the Digital Practice Award of Excellence by The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA).
Her research interests connect local and traditional material practices to contemporary technologies and issues. She is a design activist, author, and thought leader within the fields of additive manufacturing, architecture and interior design. San Fratello is the co-author of Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing (Princeton Architectural Press 2018), a book that reexamines the building process from the bottom up and offers illuminating case studies for 3D printing with materials like chardonnay grape skins, salt and sawdust. She is also a partner in Emerging Objects, a creatively driven, 3D Printing MAKE-tank specializing in innovations in 3D printing architecture, building components, environments and products (a short documentary of their work can be seen here). She recently received an Art + Technology Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to further her research in 3D printing.
San Fratello earned her Master of Architecture degree at Columbia University in the City of New York. She has served as distinguished visiting faculty at MIT, the University of Arkansas, the University of Queensland, Pratt Institute, and The University of California Berkeley. Her work has been published widely, including the New York Times, Wired, MARK, Domus, Metropolis Magazine, PRAXIS, Interior Design, Domus, the Architects Newspaper, the Public Art Review, and recognized by several institutions including: The National Building Museum, the Red Dot Design Museum, the Bellevue Museum, For Freedoms, the YBCA 100, and is included in the permanent collection of MoMA, The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Renwick, SFMOMA, the Design Museum in London, LACMA, and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya Museum in Mumbai.
