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Daniel Simon Ayat is a Lebanese-American artist, writer, and educator based in New York.

His work is critically interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of architecture, urbanism, science, and the political histories of hygiene, medicine, and technology. His work engages with the built environment as both a material practice and a cultural process, as much as a set of conditional situations as a complex confluence of paradigms which can be enacted upon and shifted.

Rooted in critical material practices and historiographic research, his work explores the cultural, ecological, and political dimensions of infrastructure, hygiene, urbanity, statecraft, and the inventions and inhabitations of public space. His research has examined topics such as sewerage and public toilets, the definitions of property, landscape, and the agricultural hinterland, the cultural impact of waste and the junk aesthetic, and the forces of rationalization and utopianism in the late modern era. His work connects themes of the everyday, materialism, health, embodiment, and civic order to broader questions of power, risk, and convention.

His practice encompasses studio experimentation, archival and historical study, material investigations, an interest in design, and a commitment to education. His work is on the whole attentive to the intrinsically ambiguous categorizations of the ‘infraordinary’, the overlooked, the non-visible,  the marginalized, and the maligned.

Background:

Daniel Ayat has contributed to international academic programs, exhibitions, and public discourses, with a consistent emphasis on making complex historical narratives accessible through spatial and material inquiry.

He has taught in the History and Theory Separtment at the Architectural Association in London, where was also a tutor and lecturer for the Architectural Association’s Visiting School in Lyngør, Norway. He was also a Visiting Assistant Professor in Humanities and Media Studies at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture and has most recently been the Visiting Fellow and Full-Time Faculty of History and Theory at TSOA: The School of Architecture, founded by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1932. Ayat holds degrees in comparative visual studies and architectural design from Tufts University,  an MA in the Histories and Theories of Architecture from the Architectural Association, an MSc in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from the University of Oxford, and an MA in Art and Science from Central Saint Martins in London.