Architect, author and educator Neil Denari is the Knowlton School’s Autumn 2015 Herbert Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professor. Denari joins a long list of prominent practitioners and scholars as Baumer Professors since the program’s inception in 1996, including Stan Allen, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Eric Owen Moss, Greg Lynn, Sylvia Lavin and last year’s Baumer Professors Preston Scott Cohen and Benjamin Bratton. During the course of their time at Knowlton, Baumer Professors lead a graduate design seminar and present a public lecture as part of the School’s Baumer Lecture Series. Denari's Baumer Professorship will be developed into volume for the school's Source Book in Architecture series.

Neil Denari emerged in New York with a series of theoretical projects and texts based on the collapse of the machine aesthetic of Modernism. In 1988, he founded his firm, Neil M. Denari Architects (NMDA), in Los Angeles and began teaching at SCI-Arc, where from 1997 to 2002 he was the director. His office is dedicated to exploring the realms of architecture, design, urbanism and all aspects of contemporary life.

Denari is the recipient of the Los Angeles AIA Gold Medal in 2011. In 2010, he was inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame and in 2009 he received the California Community Foundation Fellowship from the United States Artists organization. He received an Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters in 2008.

His work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including the solo shows “Fast Forward” at the Museum of the City of New York (2008), “Architects’ Work: HL23” at Syracuse University (2009) and “The Artless Drawing” at Ace Gallery Los Angeles (2010). In 2013, he was included in the show “New Sculpturalism” at MOCA Los Angeles.  His drawings and models are in the permanent collection of eight major museums around the world.

Denari is the author of Interrupted Projections (1996), Gyroscopic Horizons (1999), and Mass X, an 850-page multigraph on NMDA (forthcoming, 2015) as well as the director and editor of Megavoids (2015).

Since 2002, he has taught at UCLA and has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas at Arlington.