Cat Garcia-Menocal is a Cuban-American designer and sculptor based in New York City. Her spatial practice is based on the body as a site of storytelling and survival. She has designed ephemeral spaces, events, and objects for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum, The Met Gala, Hermes, Glossier, Rodarte, Isabel Marant, Dior and others. Her designs for narrative sets have included collaborations with Michel Gondry, Apple, Nas, and N.K. Jemisin. 

She also designed a factory that produced 1.24 million pieces of PPE for the NYC Economic Development Corporation during the COVID-19 pandemic - a continuation of a career-long spatial investigation into mortality, the body as a site of trauma, and equitable labor systems. 

She received her M.Arch from the Yale School of Architecture where she was a George Nelson Scholar and received the American Institute of Architects Henry Adams Medal, awarded to the top architectural graduate. She received her B.F.A from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was the first student to double major in sculpture and architecture.   

She has held teaching fellowships at the Yale University undergraduate department of art history and architecture as well as in the graduate school of architecture. As a teaching fellow at Yale, she co-developed a course on the politics of display, centered on a critical examination of spectatorship, museum architecture, power, leisure, the body, and cultural objects. Her Nelson Fellowship was an investigation of post-revolutionary cultural & museum architecture in Havana, Berlin, and Belgrade. She was an artist-in-residence at the National YoungArts Foundation and her work has been exhibited at the Onassis Cultural Center, the American Academy in Rome, and the Yale Architecture Gallery. 

She has been a panelist at Creative Time Summit and her work has been featured in Curbed, Expo-Monet, i-D, The Architect’s Newspaper, Smithsonian Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Wmagazine, Women’s Wear Daily, High Snobiety, Hypebeast, Harper’s Bazaar, Forbes and others.   

Previously, she worked at architecture firms in New York and Munich, where she designed multiple large-scale residences centered on extensive art collections. She has published over 200 articles for Designboom, where she was formerly lead architecture writer.