The Storefront for Art and Architecture announced today that Spanish-born architect Eva Franch will be taking over as director. A self-styled “contemporary nomad,” Franch is also a practicing architect, and one of few working designers to have helmed the New York institution since founding director Kyong Park launched the nonprofit in 1982.

A 2003 graduate of Barcelona’s Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura, the 31-year-old Franch earned a masters of architecture degree from Princeton, where she wrote a thesis on the architecture of Havana. She won the FAD emerging architects prize in 2007, as well as a Reyner Banham fellowship from SUNY Buffalo in 2007–2008. Since then, she has been professor and Wortham Fellow at Rice University in Houston.

"We are all thrilled at the selection of Eva Franch to lead Storefront," board president Peter Guggenheimer remarked in a statement. "She has it all — energy, intellect, charm, and a commitment to keep Storefront at the forefront of the international conversation centered on the intersections of art, architecture and urbanism.”

Franch takes over from Joseph Grima, who departed earlier this year to take up a new position with Domus magazine rethinking the publication’s content across media platforms.

Franch’s office is called OOAA, or Office of Architectural Affairs, which she refers to as “a design and research think-tank practice based in continuous exchange and collaborative work.” In a statement, Franch commented, "My practice and my deep connection to the academic world has afforded me a global perspective and I look forward to unveiling, unearthing, and spotlighting that which is on the ‘edge’ in order to provide the new grounds from where to produce new ‘vectors of desire.’" She starts late this summer.