Sacha Frey

Sacha Frey  is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.  She is an educator with over 20 years of experience teaching writing and critical theory to art and design students and has been a faculty member at Pratt Institute since 2008. Frey has a background in  spatial theory and philosophies of embodiment, contemporary poetics, and performance media. After working for several years as an editor and copywriter in the book publishing industry, Frey earned a Master’s Degree in English Literatures and Languages from New York University, culminating in a thesis on strategies of cut-up and collage used by early 20th century avant-garde poets. While pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Washington,  Frey was a teaching fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Writing Across the Curriculum program, and The Department of Women’s Studies. Frey was an instructor in the Danz Humanities lecture series “Becoming Human” and  co-founded the Modernist Studies Group at UW with support from the Katz Center for the Humanities. In 2006, Frey was awarded the Kollar Endowed Fellowship for a doctoral dissertation project that investigated  both literary and Visual Media.

Frey has been a member of the Architecture Writing faculty at Pratt since 2010, serving as the Coordinator for the First-Year Architecture Writing Program from 2018-2023.  Frey has published and developed curriculum on the use of comics as a medium for interpretation in architectural design education. As coordinator for the Architecture Writing Program, she focused on writing as a method of critical and creative engagement with the design process, utilizing a strategy of poetic correspondence and embodied language-making to incite design thinking. During her tenure at Pratt, Frey has served as a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow, teaching a range of courses, including Thesis Writing for Graduate Communication and Design and Studio Writing for Fine Arts.  In addition to teaching courses in the Humanities Core and First Year Architecture Writing at Pratt, she has also taught courses in Cultural Studies and Research Writing for the Architectural Degree Project. Frey currently teaches two upper-level and graduate Humanities electives, Poetry Across Media and Future Worlds and Other Science Fictions.

Frey is currently working on a critical-creative project about the dancer-sculptor Suzanne Harris, a founding member of the radical artists’ space 112 Greene Street in New York City, 1971-1979.  Starting in the Fall of 2023 Frey has been working with the papers and personal ephemera held in the Suzanne Harris Archives in an effort to  reconstruct her work, much of which has been lost since her early death in 1979.  This project documents, recovers, and remembers Harris’s site specific sculpture and earth work in the context of 1970s downtown New York City,  focusing on its entanglement with the urban and architectural landscape of the time. Frey’s work engages with the archives  as a site of embodied research and discovery, and she is collaborating with students in the School of Architecture to render Harris’s work as spatially distinct choreographic objects.

Ph.D. English Literature University of Washington ABD

M.A. English New York University 2001

B.A .Philosophy City University of New York Brooklyn College

Suzanne Harris: From the Archive

“Comics Beyond Fiction: Framing the Body in Architectural Narrative” by Sacha Frey and Robert Brackett, [Trans-]Fiction Issue. Sept 2020.  [Trans-]Journal. The College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture at The University of Arizona.

“Comics: Architectural Narratives. A Visual Format for Co-teaching Writing and Design.” Robert Brackett and Sacha Frey. Oklahoma University’s Schools of Thought: Rethinking Architecture Pedagogy Conference. 2020

 “Gordon Matta-Clark and 112 Greene Street.”   The Architects Newspaper. July 2013.