Ronald Rael (2026 Creative Capital Awardee) is a trained architect, artist, activist, design technologist, multi-generational rancher, and traditional builder. His work blurs the borders between architecture, art, technology, land-based practice, and social justice. He writes books, forms startup companies, advocates for human rights at the US-Mexico border, creates software, invents novel materials and new forms of construction, and designs buildings as an applied research enterprise.

Rael’s work often combines indigenous and traditional materials and processes with contemporary technologies to speak to the contrasts, contradictions, and complexities of othered subjects, ranging from people to materials and places, in contemporary society.

His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, The London Design Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Renwick Smithsonian American Art Museum. He has served as the chair of the departments of Architecture and Art Practice and is the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture at the University of California Berkeley.