saai | iaas Residencies 2026 — Fellows
It is with great pleasure that we welcome our second cohort of saai | iaas Wüstenrot Fellows in Summer 2026. Once again, exceptional researchers from across the world will engage with the archive's unique collections, and we are excited to see the new questions and ideas they will bring to this very special place.
Ezgi İşbilen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of architecture at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on twentieth-century architectural theory and history, with particular attention to prefabrication, open systems, desert urbanism, and the technological imaginaries of modernity. Her doctoral dissertation examined the work of Konrad Wachsmann, situating his approach to universal architectural systems within broader debates on standardization, mobility, and the transnational circulation of architectural ideas. Her research and teaching have been supported by fellowships and grants from the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, the AIA Northern Virginia Chapter, and Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture and Urban Studies. Her work has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Footprint, and Western Humanities Review, as well as in edited volumes by Routledge and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.
Miljana Niković is an architect, interdisciplinary artist, and researcher focusing on spatial, audiovisual, and linguistic re-appropriations. Within her doctoral and cross-media projects, she introduces *architectivism* as a set of methodologies for reactivating site-specific archival elements. Combining this approach with different montage techniques, she examines how perceptions of architectural and sociopolitical transformations are shaped by archives, and how de-/recontextualized constellations generate new narratives. Supported by the Pro Exzellenzia Plus fellowship (European Social Fund, City of Hamburg, 2022–2024) and further expanded during artist residencies (DKSG Belgrade, 2022; Kunstmeile Lower Austria, 2025), her work circulates across international academic settings (CA2RE Conferences for Artistic and Architectural Research, 2021–2024; Screen Studies Conference Glasgow, 2025), as well as in journals and edited volumes (*Senses of Cinema*, 2022; Vernon Press, 2025; Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming). Her experiments have been screened, exhibited, and awarded at international film festivals and cultural venues including Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, transmediale, Oberhausen, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, VideoEx Zürich, Slovenska Kinoteka, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Alternative Film/Video Festival, and the Austrian Cultural Forum. While her latest film-essay *Ein Ort ist kein Wort* (2026, 45') draws on a century of archival footage to portray how micro-histories form the collective memory of a town, she is currently developing a film depicting two edifices through the archives of their architect (co-production with Kunsthalle Krems, Archiv der Zeitgenossen / Krischanitz Vorlass-Gemeinschaft, and ORTE Architekturnetzwerk Niederösterreich).
Phoebus I. Panigyrakis, PhD (1991) is a Greek architect and independent researcher based in Athens. His research addresses the historical relation between architecture and media, and their influence on the profession and design process. His PhD dissertation was titled Architectural Record: 1942-1967; Chapters from the history of an architectural magazine (TU Delft, 2020). He has also conducted postdoctoral research on Open Science & Citizen Science (TU Delft, 2025), and has received grants and scholarships from the Society of Architectural Historians, the CCA, Creative Funds NL, and the Limmat Foundation. He also maintains his architectural practice, and the non-profit open access platform architecturalperiodicals.com.