Michelangelo Sabatino PhD, Hon. FRAIC. is a publicly engaged architectural historian, curator, and preservationist. He is Director of the School of Architecture + Planning (University of Texas at San Antonio) and Roland K. Blumberg Professor in Architecture. In 2025 Dr. Sabatino was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Between 2017–19 Professor Sabatino served as interim dean for the College of Architecture of IIT and held the Rowe Family Endowed Dean Chair. He lectures widely about modern and contemporary architecture and design, participates in juries, and has served on a number of editorial and not-for-profit organization boards in Europe and the Americas ranging from the Society of Architectural Historians to Docomomo International / US.
Sabatino studied at universities in Canada, Italy, and the United States of America. He earned professional degree in architecture (Laurea in Architecture) at the Università IUAV di Venezia) and a doctorate in the Department of Fine Art, University of Toronto, and held a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of History of Art + Architecture, Harvard University. Sabatino taught history and theory of architecture at Yale University and the University of Houston and IIT before his appointment to UTSA’s SA+P.. He has been a visiting scholar and professor at I Tatti, Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, The MacDowell Colony, the Georgia O’Keefe Museum Research Center, and The Newberry Library. Sabatino received grants ranging from the Graham Foundation to the Mellon Foundation.
Throughout his career Sabatino has focused new light on larger patterns of design discourse and production during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Canada, US, and Europe. His first book Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (2011) was translated into Italian and won critical acclaim and multiple awards, including the Society of Architectural Historians’ Alice Davis Hitchcock Award. Other books include Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities (with Jean-Francois Lejeune, 2011; CICA, Commendation, Bruno Zevi Book Award), Canada: Modern Architectures in History (with Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, 2016; CICA, Shortlist, Bruno Zevi Book Award), Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony (with Ben Nicholson, 2019), Making Houston Modern: The Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone (with Barrie Scardino Bradley and Stephen Fox, 2020), Carlo Mollino: Architect and Storyteller (with Napoleone Ferrari, 2021), Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929–1975 (with Susan Benjamin, 2020), The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture (2024), and Mies in His Own Words (with Vittorio Pizzigoni, 2024).
In 2012 Sabatino and his partner Serge Ambrose established Modern Again. Architecture & Preservation Studio.
email: michelangelo.sabatino(at)utsa.edu
Photograph by Peter Rigali, S. R. Crown Hall, IIT Architecture Chicago