Alison B. Snyder

Snyder’s pedagogical interests are concerned with the overlaps and intersections between architecture, artistic practice, place, and the interior. Her scholarship draws on an interdisciplinary blend of archaeological and anthropological methods to reveal how places, buildings, and interiors transform over time and create a narrative. She conducts urban and rural field-based research, mostly in Turkey and New York, to interpret and speculate on experiencing monumental and mundane settings. Investigating as both an insider and outsider, she asks cultural and socio-spatial questions that characterize and challenge norms.

Snyder’s work has been presented and published in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She is recipient of a Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts grant for her work on investigating light and the Ottoman Mosque. Additional academic grants have supported work on a variety of contexts including: the globalizing of domestic spaces and behaviors found inside Anatolian villages; cross-comparisons of street space culture as urban interiors; and, reinterpreting urban remnants and burial sites through different media within Istanbul’s and NYC’s past and present.

Before joining Pratt full-time, Snyder taught in the University of Oregon’s Department of Architecture and directed the Interior Architecture Program. She subsequently chaired the Interior Design Department at Pratt. She has also held visiting positions at Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi/METU in Ankara, Turkey, and Denmark Institute for Study Abroad, and she held part-time positions at New York Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute, and Jefferson University (Philadelphia). Snyder is a licensed architect with professional expertise in lighting and furniture design, the adaptive reuse of residential, religious and commercial spaces. She is currently Chair of the Board of Directors for the Journal of Interior Design.

B.A. Architecture, Washington University

M.Arch., GSAPP Columbia University