Emerging architectural scholars honored with Graham Foundation’s 2025 Carter Manny Prizes

The Graham Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2025 Carter Manny Awards, continuing nearly three decades of support for doctoral research that advances discourse on architecture and the built environment. The awards recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations in progress, spanning historical, cultural, and environmental approaches to architectural scholarship.

Dean Michel of Florida State University’s Department of History received the Carter Manny Writing Award, which includes a $25,000 grant. Michel’s dissertation, A Watery Grave in the Desert: Termination, Survivance, and the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, investigates the federal construction of the Parker Dam in 1938 and its impact on Chemehuevi land, sovereignty, and notions of territorial value.

The Carter Manny Research Award, accompanied by a $20,000 grant, was awarded to Anna Renken of the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Renken’s dissertation, Ecological Mediations, studies how architect-led laboratories across North America developed ecologically driven design approaches through collaborations with science and technology from the 1970s to the 1990s.

In addition, the 2025 honours included the following citations:

• Writing citation: Carrie Gammell of the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Architecture and Urban Design for Enclosing the American Frontier: Residential Architecture, Land Claims, and Mortgage Investments (1862–1934)
• Writing citation: M.C. Overholt of the University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Design for Sex Under Construction: Architecture, Sexual Science, and Queer Environments in the Twentieth-Century American City
• Writing citation: Eliza Pertigkiozoglou of McGill University, Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture for Programmed Collaboration: Work Relationships in Software for Building Design, 1970–90
• Research citation: Dante Furioso of Princeton University, History and Theory of Architecture, School of Architecture for Hammer and Machete: The Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Urbanization of Havana
• Research citation: Ruslana Lichtzier of Northwestern University, Department of Art History for Insurgent Rendering: Visual and Architectural Practices toward Indigenous Sovereignty in the Naqab Desert

Established in 1996 and named after architect Carter H. Manny, the program has provided more than $1 million in funding to 47 awardees and 149 citation recipients. You can learn more about the award from our previous coverage here.