September 22, 2017

Elena Sabinson joins our Interior Design Program as an Assistant Teaching Professor. Elena has been teaching Visualization Seminars as well as Studio courses, including Structure and the Conceptual Studio, for the past two years in Westphal’s graduate and undergraduate Interiors programs. Elena draws on her experiences as a performer, photographer, poet, and philosopher and her passion for design to inform her teaching. She is a magna cum laude graduate of the State University of New York at Binghamton and received her Master’s degree in Interior Architecture & Design from Drexel University, where she was a research assistant in the Design Futures Lab.

As a designer, her main focus is an examination of the ways in which we simultaneously shape, and are shaped by, the built environment. She is pursuing multidisciplinary research pertaining to biology, digital fabrication, robotics and ergonomics. Elena is interested in working on narrative projects that employ design as fiction. She believes that imagination and storytelling are important rituals; they inspire us to create a world that is supported and enhanced by design. She believes that our dreams have as much impact on our future as our technology. As a freelance designer in Philadelphia, Elena has done work in environmental graphics, and designing and prototyping objects.