Dana Cuff founded cityLAB in 2006, a research center at UCLA that explores the challenges facing the 21st century metropolis through design and research. She has expanded her studies of infrastructure, post-suburban Los Angeles, and new formulations of green design, most recently through funded research about the urban design implications of proposed high speed rail.

cityLAB was invited to exhibit at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, was featured on CNN and in Newsweek magazine, and was named one of the top four urban think tanks in the country by Architect Magazine in 2009. Among their projects is Backyard Homes, an investigation into doubling the capacity of single-family lots in Los Angeles, and WPA 2.0, a competition that generated innovative, implementable proposals to place infrastructure at the heart of rebuilding our cities during this next era of metropolitan recovery. In 2013, Dana Cuff and a cross-disciplinary team at UCLA received a substantial award from The Mellon Foundation for the “Urban Humanities Initiative” which brings the humanities and design together to build a new discursive platform to better understand Pacific Rim megacities.

Dana Cuff holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Design from the University of California Santa Cruz, and a PhD in Architecture from the University of California Berkeley.

Her work focuses on affordable housing, modernism, suburban studies, the politics of place, and the spatial implications of new computer technologies. She has published research on postwar urbanism in The Provisional City (2000) and she recently edited Fast Forward Urbanism with Roger Sherman (2011).