Elisheva Levy

Elisheva Levy is an architecture historian and researcher. After receiving her MFA from Yale University School of Art (Sculpture department), Elisheva studied civil engineering. She has extensive experience as a teacher, teaching Fine Art and Architecture Design Studio for over a decade at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem.

At Weitzman School of design’s architecture department at UPenn, Elisheva is working on her PhD research into homes which present a radical break from the single-family, isolated, would-be-independent, finance and crises-based household so prominent in Western cultures under capitalism. Investigating a variety of historical and contemporary sources, spanning from the indigenous to utopian, Elisheva's research aims to offer analysis from which to imagine communal and egalitarian alternatives to the unsustainable living typologies normalized through the global advancement of free-market capitalism.

The research Elisheva has conducted so far at Penn was presented in Architecture & Collective Life, the 16th Annual International Conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (2020); at the Theory Collective for Social Research at the New School, New York (both in 2020 and in 2022); at Penn’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Colloquium (2021); in Make Way for Winged Eros a podcast by anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee; and in From the Margins - Perspectives on Architecture a podcast by architectural historian German Pallares. In 2022, Elisheva’s work was presented in The First Annual Black Feminist Theory Summer Institute at Duke University, and at Weitzman School of Design architecture PhD forum. Lately, Elisheva was selected as a Penn Program in Environmental Humanities Graduate Fellow for 2022-23.