Kateryna Malaia, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Utah. She studies the evolution of residential architecture and politics of monument demolition and construction in times of social change through the lenses of cultural practices and material culture. She is particularly interested in the transformation of urban dwellings in relation to the collapse of the USSR, and current architectural transformations brought forth by housing insecurity in the United States. Malaia’s writing has been published in venues including East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, PLATFORM, Architectural Histories, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Her first book Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture Before and After 1991, explains the dramatic transformations that, despite the persistence of Soviet urban infrastructure, took place in urban apartment dwellings during the years before and after the collapse of state-socialism in 1991 (NIUP/Cornell University Press, August 2023). Together with Philipp Meuser, she is working on a catalogue of mass-built housing series in Ukraine to be released in December 2023.

Malaia has previously taught at Mississippi State University, Portland State University, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She has studied architecture at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv, Ukraine, and the School of Architecture, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

At the U, she teaches graduate studio on urban housing, and a course on research methods for graduate architecture students. Malaia is involved in an inter-university research and educational project on housing insecurity, with its first research location in Central Mississippi. This field study and public history project documents the lived spaces and histories of Mississippians, who have experienced or are experiencing housing insecurity. This project also aims to promote nuanced understanding of the historic and current American trouble with housing.

Currently, Malaia is developing two new projects: a collection of essays on the everyday spaces of public protest co-edited with Nathan Hutson, and a study of the serially constructed rural housing in Ukraine built prior to 1991.

As part of her efforts in understanding existing conditions and damage inflicted by Russian attacks on Ukrainian residential architecture, Malaia is a member of Ro3kvit Coalition for Ukrainian reconstruction. Malaia is also a contributing member of GAHTC—Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative—that facilitates teaching about all periods and localities in Architectural History surveys in place of the traditional Western focus on select few.