Stephen Zacks has spent the last twenty-five years dedicated to advocacy journalism, architecture criticism, book editing, urbanism, project organizing—and lately, improving his tennis technique. A native of Flint, Michigan, he graduated from Michigan State University and New School for Social Research with a bachelor’s in interdisciplinary humanities and a master’s in liberal studies. Until recently based in New York City, he currently lives in Mexico City.
His cultural history A Beautiful Ruin: The Rebirth of New York City in the Age of Financialization—Wild Actions, Cultural Actions, and Radical Organizing in Abandoned Space will be published by Inventory Press in spring 2027. His monograph on the seminal late twentieth–century New York artist G.H. Hovagimyan, Situationist Funhouse, was published by ORO Editions in 2022. He recently completed an English translation of French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévich’s influential three-part essay L’aventure, l’ennuie, et le serieux (“Adventure, Boredom, and the Serious”) [1963].
Zacks works as an independent architecture book editor for Actar, Axiomatic Editions, Cahiers d’Art, Goff Books, and Lars Müller Publishers, and writes regularly for Abitare, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, the Architect’s Newspaper, Dwell, Metropolis, and Oculus. He has published in the New York Times, Village Voice, Art in America, Architectural Review, Architectural Record, Brownstoner, Curbed, Domus, A+U, Monocle, Blueprint, Mic, Places, Print, Wallpaper, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Hyperallergic, and previously served as an editor at Metropolis.
In 2011, he founded Flint Public Art Project to organize public events, workshops, and permanent and temporary installations to inspire residents to reimagine the city, reclaim vacant and underutilized buildings and lots, and use innovative tools to steer the long-range urban planning of Flint, Michigan. He serves as president of the nonprofit Amplifier Inc., a non-governmental organization that employs emerging ideas, media, design, and aesthetic strategies to advance alternative political and economic frameworks and institutional transformation. His projects have received awards from ArtPlace, Creative Capital, Warhol Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Graham Foundation, MacDowell, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
He co-directed the Collective: Unconscious performance space on the Lower East Side from 1996 to 2002 and wrote several works of long fiction, including Ideology of a Rock Star (1996), which was produced as a theatrical performance by Al Ramos’s Tribeca Lab in 1999. His 1995 essay on African film criticism, edited by Kenneth Harrow for Research in African Literatures, “The Theoretical Construction of African Cinema,” has been widely citied and anthologized.
CONTACT:
szacks(at)gmail.com
