Eva Franch i Gilabert (born 10 December 1978 in Ebro Delta) is a Catalan architect, curator, critic and educator based in New York City who works in the fields of contemporary art, architecture, and public space. From 2010 to 2018, she was executive director and chief curator of Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. From 2018 to 2020, Franch was director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Princeton University. Early life and education Eva Franch i Gilabert grew up in Deltebre, a town southwest of Barcelona in Catalonia, working in her mother's hair salon before leaving to study architecture in Barcelona and Delft. It is said a potential career as a figure skater had been cut short by injury at the age of 17, after which Franch studied architecture. Franch holds master’s degrees in architecture with honors from both ETSA Barcelona (2003, UPC Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), and Princeton University (2007). She also studied at the School of Fine Arts and the School of Philosophy in Barcelona/UB, and at TU Delft as part of the European Erasmus Exchange Programme. Career During her studies Franch worked in the Catedra Gaudi, a research center dedicated to the architect Antoni Gaudi. Aged 22, Franch had a three-month internship in a Rotterdam-based firm, working on public buildings, masterplanning and social housing, after which she became a full-time employee heading the competitions team. She then moved to Barcelona and founded OOAA, Office Of Architectural Affairs. Aged 24, she obtained a La Caixa full fellowship to study in the United States and went to Princeton. She was then awarded a Reyner Banham Fellowship that enabled her to teach and develop new research in Buffalo, and a Wortham Fellowship at Rice University in Houston, Texas where she led the Ecologies of Excess research unit and was also the coordinator of its masters thesis program. Storefront for Art and Architecture (2010-2018) In 2010, Franch became the executive director and chief curator of Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City where she presented more than 30 exhibitions and a series of public events and debates that catalyzed the art and architecture community for almost a decade around spatial issues addressing the relation between politics, representation, and aesthetics. Under her tenure Storefront gained an international presence with a series of innovative curatorial projects and initiatives including