Draft:Bz Zhang

Bz Zhang 张迪 (born 1991) is an American artist and architect based in Tovaangar/Los Angeles, California.

Zhang's work includes drawings, paintings, photographs, texts, objects, spaces, and maps, using documentation and speculation as strategies to understand settler colonial pasts and presents and to imagine possible liberatory, anti-colonial futures.

Zhang is trained in painting and architecture, and they draw from their background in racial justice and climate justice organizing to inform their practice.

Zhang received a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Visual Arts from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley College of Environmental Design, in Berkeley, California.

They have taught architecture at the University of Southern California, University at Buffalo, University of Michigan, California College of the Arts, and University of California, Berkeley.

Zhang is a core organizer with the Design As Protest Collective and Dark Matter U. They are a licensed architect in the state of California.

As a project manager with the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, they use tools of both community organizing and design and construction to work with communities across Los Angeles County toward environmental justice.

Zhang's work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Providence, and Philadelphia.

Most recently, their work has been shown at CalArts and the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.

They have also exhibited as part of the Design As Protest Collective in YOU ARE A(NTI)RACIST, in Chicago, Illinois, and as part of Dark Matter U in DMUxLisbon, in the Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa in Lisbon, Portugal.

Zhang has received fellowships, grants, and residencies from the Journal of Architectural Education, the Graham Foundation, the University of Southern California School of Architecture, where they were the inaugural Citizen Architect Fellow, Twenty Summers, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, and Art Farm, among others.

Zhang has been published in The Avery Review, the Journal of Architectural Education, Architect Magazine, The Architect's Newspaper, Critical Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, and others.

Zhang has spoken at The Cooper Union, the University of California, Berkeley, City College of New York Spitzer School of Architecture, California College of the Arts, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, and others.

Zhang is Chinese-diasporic, queer, and nonbinary.