Assistant Professor
Co-Director, Master of Architecture Program
Office: Greene Building, 102
Email: 
Phone: (518) 276-4060

Master of Architecture II, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Bachelor of Architecture, The Cooper Union

Yael Erel is an architect, educator and light artist. She interweaves light optics research with academic teaching and practice as ways to understand and explore ideas in built form. Erel is a registered architect as well as president and co-founder of lightexture, a lighting practice where she designs and constructs light fixtures and light art installations that explore sensorial and formal properties of light. Erel graduated with honors from The Cooper Union School of Architecture where she received the Irma Giustino Weiss Prize for creative achievement. As light became the focus of Erel’s practice, she pursued her graduate studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to gain deep knowledge of light as material. Her current research studies systems of light sources and reflectors that construct spatial and temporal light-drawings. Erel’s work has been published and exhibited at EMPAC, Troy Glow Light Festival, The Center for Mediterranean Architecture (CAM), Cornell University AAP, the miSci Museum of Science, Albany Airport, MIT as well as NYC and Philadelphia Galleries among others. Erel and her practice lightexture were awarded the 2023 (d)arc Award ART-LOW for the project Reverberating Light and the second prize in the 2022(d)arc Awards for their project Reflecting on Troy, featured in the Troy Glow Light Festival. Her jewelry collection was sold MASS MoCA museum store. She has lectured internationally in KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; Tel Aviv University, Israel; Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada; California College of the Arts, Burlington Sessions by Signify, as well as Light Symposium, AMPS, IAFOR, EAEA and ACSA conferences among others. She is a published writer and the recipient 2020 Architectural Education JAE Best Article Award. She has been awarded the 2015 and 2022 The Robert S. Brown ’52 Fellows Program – RPI School of Architecture Faculty Award. In 2023 She is the awarded both rounds of the NYSCA Individual Artist SCR GRANT towards the project Reverberating Light, installed at EMPAC in both the 2023 Deep listening ISTAMA Conference as well as a multi-disciplinary installation at EMPAC STUDIO 1. In 2024, she was awarded the Arts Thrive Grow Award towards her lighting of the Opera workshop “The other side of Silence”.

For over a decade Erel has been deeply immersed in architectural education, teaching architecture at the Harvard GSD, The Cooper Union, Columbia University and Pratt Institute, where she received a faculty development grant to develop environmental lighting fixtures. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Rensselaer School of Architecture, where she Co-Directs the Master of Architecture Program.