DANA ČUPKOVÁ is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Cornell University Department of Architecture and a co-principal of EPIPHYTE Lab. Before founding EPIPHYTE Lab, Dana directed the architectural design practice DCm-STUDIO. She received a Dipl.ING.ARCH. from the Faculty of Architecture and Urban design at the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava, Slovakia and a Master of Architecture from School of the Arts and Architecture at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she was awarded the Unrestricted University Fellowship, the Mimi Perloff Award, and the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship for outstanding design work. She has worked for Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects, Stan Allen Architect, Reiser + Umemoto, RUR Architecture in New York City, and T.R. Hamzah & Yeang in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Dana's design for the Sandra Gering Gallery in Chelsea was honored in a "New York Designs 2005: So what’s the big idea?" lecture series competition sponsored by the Architectural League of NY. Her work has been published and exhibited internationally and recently included in the book Young European Architects, published by DAAB GmbH in Köln. Dana’s current academic work and research is focused on ecologically adaptive component construction systems and their cultural and socio-political effects. For this work she was awarded a Cornell University Faculty Innovation in Teaching Grant, which will further support embedding the methods of contemporary fabrication technology into architectural design through a better understanding of computationally generated geometry and its responsiveness to particular climactic conditions. This line of research has also been awarded the AIA Architectural Foundation's Arnold W. Brunner Grant, which she received in collaboration with Kevin Pratt. Dana's practices deal with both real and speculative projects exploring spatial organizations derived through the systematic subversion of normative architectural models and their adaptation to local ecologies.