Bz Zhang

Visiting Critic

Bz Zhang is an architect, organizer, and artist based in Tovaangar (so-called Los Angeles). They are a licensed architect in California, a core organizer with the Design As Protest Collective and Dark Matter U, and a project manager with the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, where they work with communities toward environmental justice through design, construction, and stewardship of public green spaces.

Their design and research practice wonders aloud about representations of violence and the violence of representations by asking questions both using and about disciplinary tools of art and architecture. Through drawings, paintings, objects, spaces, and maps, their work unravels cultural constructions (ideas of people, places, and things) and their physical constructions (whether birthed or built). They trace migration, labor, capital, and empire through visual representations of extraction and resistance, particularly through the lens of Chinese diaspora across the Americas. Throughout, Bz proposes uniquely Chinese-diasporic modes of cultural production that rise above dominant narratives toward our shared liberatory futures.

Bz was a 2022 Journal of Architectural Education Fellow and 2021 USC Citizen Architect Fellow. Previously, they have taught architecture at the University of Southern California, California College of the Arts, University of Michigan, and University of California, Berkeley. Bz received degrees from University of California, Berkeley and Brown University. In their free time, they look for birds and trash in the Los Angeles River.