Dr Donia Zhang

My Profile

Dr Donia Zhang is an author and scholar of Architectural Humanities based in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. She is the Director of the Neoland School of Chinese Culture and Chinese Culture Publishing, and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Chinese Architecture and Urbanism (JCAU), and Courtyard Architecture: along the Silk Roads, around the World.

Moreover, she contributed three chapters in two eBooks, Dialogues of Sustainable Urbanisation: Social Science Research and Transitions to Urban Contexts (2015), and New Approaches in Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism (2020). She has also published 20 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals. Furthermore, she is a contributor of three entries and translated the Chinese lexicon for the Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (2022, 2nd ed). WorldCat has listed most of these publications.

Donia has seven years of work experience in the architectural industry in Toronto and Chicago, and eleven years of teaching experience in higher education in Ontario, Canada. The subjects she has taught include: History of Art and Architecture, Interior Design, and AutoCAD, among others. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Architectural Research and Development (JARD), Architecture and Design Review (ADR), and International Journal of Architecture, Arts and Applications (IJAAA).

Donia is a graduate of Oxford Brookes University (BArch, MA, PhD) in the UK and Brock University (MEd) in Canada. She has also obtained a Verified Certificate of Achievement in The Architectural Imagination from Harvard University | edX, and a Verified Certificate of Achievement in Interpreting Vernacular Architecture in Asia from the University of Hong Kong | edX. She is a former associate at the City Institute at York University, and a visiting scholar/occasional co-instructor at McMaster University, Canada.

Keywords: Architectural humanities, Architecture and urbanism, Courtyard housing, Chinese culture, Philosophy of architecture

Keynote Speaker

"Courtyard Housing around the World: A Cross-Cultural Analysis and Contemporary Relevance" (Best Paper Award) at the 3rd International Conference of Contemporary Affairs in Architecture and Urbanism (ICCAUA), Alanya HEP University, Turkey, 2020/5/6. Cambridge Open Engage: https://doi.org/10.33774/coe-2020-rb9n2

Key Talks

Book Review

News Media

"Beijing's Five Architectural Colors, and the Symbolism Behind Them" 2020/2/1 | By Jeremiah Jenne
"Benefits of the Courtyard House Design" 2018/2/19 | Blog post by TH!NK by IBI; Photo by Rikke Filbaert Larsen on Unsplash

Academia Sites

Social Media Sites