Kathy Velikov is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan where she teaches design studio, courses in ecology and technology and is the co-coordinator of the Master of Science concentration in Material Systems. She was the 2006/07 Oberdick Fellow at Taubman College, and has previously held teaching appointments at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo. Kathy is a licensed architect in the State of Michigan and the Province of Ontario, a partner in the research-based practice RVTR and a co-founder of the Metropolitan Futures Group. She holds an MA in the history of art and architecture from the University of Toronto, and a Professional BArch and BES from the University of Waterloo. Prior to founding RVTR, Kathy spent over ten years in practice as a project architect and senior designer on urban masterplans, institutional buildings, private residences, and design competitions. She has also spent a number of seasons working with archaeological teams in Carthage, Tunisia.

Founded in 2007, RVTR serves as a platform for platform for exploration and experimentation in the agency of architecture and urban design within the context of dynamic ecological systems, infrastructures, materially and technologically mediated environments and emerging social organizations. The work of this highly collaborative practice ranges in scale from that of the regional territory and the city, to high performance buildings, to full-scale installation-based prototypes that explore responsive and kinetic envelopes that mediate energy, atmosphere and social space. These operational scales are tied together through a methodology that entails an ecological approach; one that assembles around each project a multiplicity of agents, forces and contexts and actively uses these multivalent and sometimes contradictory agents to drive new potentials for the work. Kathy is also a co-founder of the Metropolitan Futures Group (MFG), a trans-disciplinary design consortium comprised of internationally recognized researchers and designers across different University of Michigan academic units that was established to address the problem of the notable absence of design in policy processes that affect the organization, form and materiality of constructed environments, and, therefore, issues concerning quality of life.

Kathy's work has been highly awarded and published widely. Awards include a Journal of Architectural Education Best Design as Research Article (2013), the Architizer A+ Award Program's Architecture + Sound Jury Award (2013), an ACSA Faculty Design Award (2012), a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Award of Excellence for Innovation in The Practice of Architecture (2011), a Special Jury Prize from EcoStructure Magazine (2011), an R&D Award from Architecture Magazine (2010), the Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture from the Canada Council for the Arts (2009-2010), a Young Architects Forum Award from the Architecture League of New York (2008) and a Canadian Architect Award of Excellence (2005). Critical writing and projects have been published in Volume, [bracket] Goes Soft, MONU, Leonardo, International Journal of Architectural Computing, New Geographies Journal, Journal of Architectural Education, and in books published by MIT Press, Routledge, Taylor and Francis, Princeton Architectural Press and Jovis Verlag. Most recently, RVTR completed a major solo exhibition at the UQAM Centre de Design in Montreal entitled Infra Eco Logi Urbanism(e).