Yael Erel is an architect, educator and light artist. She interweaves light optics research with academics and artistic practice to explore light as a tangible – and simultaneously intangible – spatial medium. Erel is a registered architect and co-founder of lightexture, a lighting design studio where she develops light fixtures and installations that experiment with the sensorial and formal properties of light. Immersed in Architectural education since 2004, Erel is an Assistant Professor at Rensselaer School of Architecture, where her teachings explore the relationships between light, architecture, and tectonics to foster a deeper understanding of light. 

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Her current research utilizes systems of light sources and reflectors as means to construct spatiotemporal light drawings. This body of work has been published and exhibited at EMPAC, Troy Glow Light Festival, The Center for Mediterranean Architecture (CAM), Cornell University AAP, the miSci Museum of Science, Albany Airport, MIT as well as galleries in major cities such as New York and Philadelphia. She has been the recipient of several awards, winning the 2023 (d)arc Award ART-LOW for the project Reverberating Light and the second prize in the 2022(d)arc Awards for Reflecting on Troy. 

She has lectured internationally at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, Tel Aviv University in Israel, Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada, and at California College of the Arts in the United States. She has also delivered lectures at conferences such as the Burlington Sessions by Signify, Light Symposium, AMPS, IAFOR, EAEA, and ACSA, among others. She is a published author and the recipient of the 2020 Architectural Education JAE Best Article Award. She has been awarded the 2015 and 2022 Robert S. Brown ’52 Fellows Program - RPI School of Architecture Faculty Award. In 2023, She was awarded both rounds of the NYSCA Individual Artist SCR Grant toward the project Reverberating Light, a large-scale installation debuted at EMPAC for the 2023 Deep listening ISTAMA Conference and for public display at EMPAC STUDIO 1. In 2024, she was awarded the Arts Thrive Grow Award toward the lighting of the opera workshop The Other Side Of Silence. 

Erel graduated with honors from The Cooper Union School of Architecture, receiving the Irma Giustino Weiss Prize for creative achievement, and as light became the focus of Erel’s practice, she pursued her graduate studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to gain a deeper understanding of light as material. She has taught at several institutions including Harvard GSD, Columbia University, Pratt Institute, and The Cooper Union. She currently serves as an Assistant Professor & Co-Director of the Masters of Architecture Program at the Rensselaer School of Architecture.