M.C. Overholt is a second-year Architecture Ph.D. student in the History and Theory track at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. Her scholarly interests include Black feminist theory and women of color feminisms, histories of sexuality, affect theory, and entanglements between architecture and social scientific expertise in the last four decades of the 20th century.
She is also a recent graduate of the Master of Environmental Design (M.E.D.) program at Yale School of Architecture. Her Master’s thesis, titled “Space-Praxis: Towards a Feminist Politics of Design,” explored an array of feminist spatial interventions into the built environment from the 1970s to present day. The project was positioned to challenge the disciplinary boundaries of ‘architecture’ by attending to self-help design principles made manifest in women’s abortion clinics, community centers, co-operative housing projects, and community land trusts. This thesis research was generously supported by The Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM). M.C. was also a recipient of a 2020-2021 long term fellowship from the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC), sponsored by the Massachusetts Historical Society.
At Yale, M.C. was a curatorial research assistant for the Room(s) exhibition (on view September-December 2021). She was also a Teaching Fellow for two undergraduate courses in Yale College, “Introduction to Urban Studies” and “American Architecture and Urbanism.” During the Fall of 2020, she co-founded the M.E.D. Working Group for Anti-Racism with Laura Pappalardo, Alex Whee Kim, and Keller Easterling.
M.C. graduated from Stanford University in 2017 with a B.S. in Engineering, majoring in Architectural Design. From 2017 to 2019, she was a designer at SHoP Architects in New York City.
