About
Manifest Institute is dedicated to creating a new kind of environment for the study of the art, architecture, and cities of the Americas. Founded by Anthony Acciavatti, Dan Handel, and Enrique Ramirez, Manifest Institute enriches the public domain through publications, exhibitions, and public programs.
Through its activities, the Manifest Institute of the Americas seeks to foster critical and imaginative conversations about American space and the forms and ideas which it animates. The deliberate use of the term Americas in the plural connotes the multiplicity of territories, formed by an uneasy layering of environments, peoples, and ideologies. The Manifest Institute initiates and moderates inquiries in art, architecture and urbanism, literary studies and landscape design and channels them through innovative cultural formats. By promoting original voices and new ways of cultural experimentation, the Manifest Institute seeks to explore the potency of American-ness to spring new insights and modes of operation for the fraught design disciplines in today’s realities.
Directors
Anthony Acciavatti
is trained in architecture, geography, and history of science, He is the author of the award winning Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River and is a founding partner of Somatic Collaborative in New York City and the Diana Balmori Assistant Professor at Yale University.
Dan Handel
is an architect and curator whose work focuses on research-based exhibitions with special attention to underexplored ideas, figures, and practices that shape contemporary built environments.
Enrique Ramirez
is a writer and a historian of art and architecture. His work considers histories of buildings, cities, and landscapes alongside larger cultures of textual and literary production in Europe and the Americas from the Renaissance onwards. He is currently a faculty member at Yale School of Art, where he teaches seminars on print history at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.