Diana Ibáñez López
Profession
MA Cities Course Leader
College
Central Saint Martins
Person Type
Teacher
Biography
Diana Ibáñez López is an academic and urbanist working at the intersections of creative, spatial and bureaucratic practices, with a particular interest in how cities are shaped through institutional, cultural and civic processes.
She leads MA Cities, a two-year studio-based course within Central Saint Martins’ Spatial Practices Programme. The course develops new city-making practices through situated research, working transnationally and intervening across scales, from the voice in the city to global infrastructures, bringing together design, policy, and collaborative experimentation.
Diana is also co-founder of UAL Climate Cities Lab, a multidisciplinary hub for research, knowledge exchange and innovation that interrogates how cities are constructed, experienced and governed in the context of climate crisis.
Alongside her academic work, Diana has extensive experience in London’s public sector across housing, cultural commissioning and delivery. She was formerly a senior curator and then Artistic Director at Create London, a charitable arts organisation delivering useful art in public contexts, in collaboration with communities, artists and local authorities. At Create, she cliented the £5.5m Stirling Prize-nominated A House for Artists by Apparata Architects; commissioned permanent social infrastructure for the Becontree Centenary in Dagenham, including Yinka Ilori’s first permanent public playground and a network of sculptural benches by Studio Morison; and led a curatorial team shortlisted to curate the British Pavilion at the XVII Venice Architecture Biennale, proposing turning the pavilion into a working pub to host much-needed rowdy conversations about the on-the-ground impacts of Brexit in the UK and Europe.
Previously, Diana ran Architecture MA studios at the Royal College of Art and Kingston, was a Visiting Professor at HfG Karlsruhe’s Product Design school exploring how to engage the city's water systems through design, and was an associate of The Why Factory Future Cities think tank at the University of Delft. Before moving into teaching and municipal practices, she worked at MVRDV on projects such as the Markthal, which transformed Rotterdam’s city centre, and on urban masterplans in China, Korea and the Netherlands.
Diana is an executive board member at Troy Town Art Pottery, supervises three PhD students at CSM and is currently developing research into bureaucratic spatial practices in the City of London.