Elif Erez

Elif Erez (she/her) is a Designer I in Studio Gang’s New York office, returning for her third stint at the Studio. She earned her bachelor’s degree in architecture from Yale University and is currently enrolled in the M.Arch I program at the Harvard GSD, where she focuses on issues of urbanism and ecology. She has previously interned for Kengo Kuma in Tokyo; taught an architecture workshop in Naoshima, Japan, for the education collective GAKKO, Inc.; and spent summers working as a construction manager for Habitat for Humanity in San Francisco and as a curatorial assistant at the Royal Portrait Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Elif was initially drawn to Studio Gang for its approach to architecture that uses design as a tool to bring people together and to create better spaces and more resilient communities. What drew her back was, again, people—this time the amazing team of designers that bring a diverse array of backgrounds and insights to the Studio. A consummate maker, Elif came to architecture through designing and building theater sets, which led her to take an architecture class out of curiosity. She enjoys thinking at multiple scales, jumping back and forth from the scale of the city to the scale of a building to the scale of the human body and its interaction with its immediate surroundings.

Born and raised in Istanbul, Elif is located in Brooklyn but thinks of home as wherever her bike is. Outside of the Studio, she enjoys listening to and making podcasts, writing sci-fi stories, running, cycling, and cooking. Her favorite natural landscapes include Black Moshannon State Park in Pennsylvania, Bear Mountain State Park in New York, and Green Mountain in Vermont. Her favorite bodies of water are, in order of size, the Mediterranean Sea, the Bosphorus strait in Istanbul, Lake George in New York, and Walden Pond in Massachusetts.