She is the author of Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013). Her work explores the ethics and politics of digital mapping and its technologies; the art, science and visualization of big and small data; and design environments for public engagement with maps and data. From 2004 - 2015, she founded and directed the Spatial Information Design Lab at GSAPP. The SIDL "Million Dollar Blocks" project is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and her work has also been shown at Palais De Tokyo and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, MACBa in Barcelona and the ZKM in Karlsruhe. In 2009, Kurgan was awarded a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. 

She received her MArch from Columbia, GSAPP, where she has received the GSAPP Visualization Award, William Kinne Fellows Travelling Prize and the 'Avery 6' Award.

His work predominantly explores methodologies, collaborative processes, and tools that engage or activate data and media toward spatial justice. Prior to joining the CSR, Dan managed human rights and spatial analysis casework at Brooklyn-based architectural practice SITU as well as access to and visualization of historical US Census data at Social Explorer. He has contributed to work exhibited at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Yale University Art Gallery, and he has taught methods in environmental and urban sociology at Queens College CUNY.

With an M.S. in Computational Design Practices from Columbia GSAPP, where she received the Honour Award for Outstanding Capstone, she brings an interdisciplinary perspective, rooted in Cognitive Science, to her research. Before joining the CSR, Zoe was a Research Fellow for the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, working on the design and development of Reward Reports, a new AI Documentation framework, and served as a Data Analyst Fellow at the Downtown Alliance.

With a background in architecture and research, Virginia intends to critically navigate and expand upon the intersections of Architecture and Technology; as a method, concept, and practice - as an active multi-scalar model, a growing metabolism, of designing, shaping, and rendering notions of space, time, & ideology.

She is particularly interested in how Computational Design can be used to create new models and strategies to address the pressing challenges resulting of our world constituted of many complex interdependent adaptive systems, based on the intricate co-evolutionary relationship of societies, environments, politics, and technologies. As she confronts the intricacies of the past, negotiates the present, and anticipates the future, Virginia is interested in exploring new forms of computational design and architecture. These forms promote self-adaptive complex systems, new collaborative models and embrace interspecies design. Virginia’s aspiration is to expand the architecture discipline, for a viable society and planetarity.

Over the past year, Virginia has worked in Berkeley and Berlin, diving into AI research, emergent technologies, speculative design and architecture. Her diverse career includes collaborations with design studios and institutions like Strelka Insitute, WAA - Wiel Arets Architects, Herzog & de Meuron, OMA AMO, MoMA and the Architekturmuseum TUM. She holds a Masters in Architecture focusing on Cultural Heritage History and Criticism and a BA in Architecture from the Technical University Munich.

He has previously contributed to data-based research and visualization on the topics of segregation, commutes, and paramilitary conflict at CSR and the Urban Planning Department at GSAPP. He will graduate with an MArch and M.S. Urban Planning from Columbia GSAPP in 2024.