About

Dan Handel is an architect, curator, and writer whose research-based work explores how images, objects, and ideas shape the built environment. Moving between architectural history, visual culture, and landscape history, his projects examine how representations of architecture and nature mediate relationships between design, scientific knowledge, and broader cultural and political ideas. His work often begins with underexplored figures, images, and practices, uncovering unexpected connections across architectural and cultural history.

He was the inaugural Young Curator at the at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, has developed exhibitions for the Venice Biennale and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and was curator of architecture and design at the Israel Museum. More recently, he curated the exhibition The Design of Carpets that Design Us at the CCA and Game of Goose at the Neutra VDL House.

Handel holds an MArch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a PhD from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.

His writing has appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, e-flux Architecture, Thresholds, Frame, San Rocco, Pin-Up, Bracket, and the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JOLA), among others. He is the editor of the publications Aircraft Carrier (Hajte Cantz, 2012), Yasky and Co. (Tel Aviv Museum. 2016), and Manifest, a journal of the Americas. He is the author of Designed Forests: A Cultural History (Routledge, 2024)

Handel is the recipient of grants from the Graham Foundation for Manifest (2012, 2014, 2022) and Carpet Space (2019).