Elana Shapira

Cultural and design historian; lectures at the University of Vienna, at University of Applied Arts Vienna and at the Central European University; curated and convened the International Symposium “Émigré Design Culture: Histories of the Social in Design” (2015); organized the International Symposium “Design Dialogue: Jewish Contributions to Viennese Modernism” (2016) and the International Symposium “Designing Transformation: Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism” (2019); She further co-organized with Daniela Finzi the International Symposium “Freud and the Émigré” (2018), with A.-K. Rossberg the Symposium “Gestalterinnen: Women, Design and Society in Vienna in the Interwar Period” (2021), and with D. Stratigakos and M. Platzer the International Workshop "Rediscovering Ella Briggs" (2022). Her forthcoming International Symposium are “Austrian Identity and Modernity / Modernity and Austrian Identity” (University of Applied Arts Vienna, November 17-18, 2022) and co-organized with D. Finzi and M. Pessler, "Psychoanalysis and Art: Confronting Violence Against Women in Society" (Freud Museum, March 31, 2023).

Selected Publications: Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons and Modern Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna (2016); editor of Designing Transformation: Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism (2021) and of Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism (2018); co-editor of Freud and the Émigré (2020) and of Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture (2017); “Kiesler’s Imaging Exile in Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery and the New York Avant-Garde Scene in the early 1940s,” in: Arrival Cities (2020); “‘Our Great Josef Hoffmann’: Undoing the Austrian Profile of a Celebrated Architect,” in: Erasures and Eradications in Viennese Modernism (Forthcoming 2022); and her forthcoming co-edited anthology is Gestalterinnen: Women, Design and Society in Vienna in the Interwar Period (2023) and Ella Briggs: An Unconventional Architect (working title, 2024).