Abigail Zola

Abigail Zola earned her BFA in Interior Architecture from The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at The George Washington University, where she received the Juror's Choice Award for her capstone project. She went on to complete her Master of Architecture with Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). At RISD, Abigail worked at the Arts and Language Center, helping students refine their portfolios through layout design, visual hierarchy, and clear project descriptions. While at RISD Abigail took a graduate architecture studio called “Superabsorbed,” where together with a partner worked on a semester-long design project. The prompt was to select an abandoned or dilapidated industrial site and rehabilitate the building and its functionality using AI to aid in the design process, you can read about her experience with AI and her project here.

Abigail was awarded the Fred and Maria Devinki Memorial Digital Humanities Fellowship by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for her research project, “Uncovering Emotional Contamination: Redefining the Process of Site-Specific Analysis.” Her master’s thesis explored the concept of "emotional contamination"—the residual feelings associated with spaces where negative or tragic events have occurred, whether personally, historically, or politically. Her work examined how emotional contamination affects people’s associations with a place and their willingness to spend time there. Abigail's project established design principles that acknowledge the lifespan of a site, proposing an urban system for addressing this concept, rather than limiting it to individual architectural artifacts. Her research included case studies in Berlin, analyzing how political and economic factors influence site interventions and how these spaces reshape our understanding of architecture's role in emotional contamination and memorialization.

Her expertise in portfolio presentation and attention to detail make her an invaluable guide for students at this crucial stage of their creative development.

Currently, Abigail works as a freelance architectural designer in New York City.