Ingrid Ruudi

Ingrid Ruudi is Researcher and Visiting Associate in the Estonian Academy of Arts, in Tallinn. She completed her Ph.D. in the Academy’s Institute of Art History and Visual Culture in 2020. Her dissertation, titled “Spaces of Interregnum: Transformations in Estonian Architecture and Art 1986-1994,” received special recognition from Estonia’s National Heritage Board.

Dr. Ruudi’s work is centered on the interrelationship of society and space – the way differing social formations generate their own spatial configurations and create differing subjectivities, thus contributing to the shaping of these environments and conditioning – or challenging – social norms and possibilities. She also has a long-standing interest in feminist approaches to architectural design and analysis of patterns of spatial use. In 2019 she curated a major research exhibition: A Room of One’s Own: A Feminist’s Questions to Architecture at the Estonian Museum of Architecture.

At Yale Dr. Ruudi will study spaces of care in late Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia: maternity hospitals, orphanages, mental health institutions, nursing homes for the elderly and the disabled, analyzing how the spatial arrangements contributed to the construction of marginalized subjectivities of the society.