Dominic Leong (KanakaʻŌiwi) is a founding partner at Leong Leong, an internationally recognized architecture studio based in New York. He focuses on architecture as an aesthetic, social, and ecological practice. The studio operates at the intersection of art and living, collaborating with diverse partners to advance social agendas within the built environment.

His current research examines design as a tool of sovereignty and the ahupuaʻa, a Hawaiian land division extending from mountain to ocean, as an advanced biocultural urbanism. At the Yale School of Architecture, he co-leads Becoming ʻĀina: Hawaiʻi, a graduate field school in Koʻolaupoko, Oʻahu, developed in collaboration with Kawena Elkington, PhD. Launched in 2026, the program works with community partners to support bioregional design practices grounded in KanakaʻŌiwi epistemology and ontology.

In fall 2024, Dominic was the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor of Architectural Design at Yale, where he led the advanced studio Oceanic Worldbuilding: From the Archive to an Architecture for ʻĀina. Working across different Oceanic archives, including the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and the Yale Peabody Museum, students explored how architecture at scales from exhibition displays to urban landscape could transform museums from sites of colonial dispossession into places with infrastructures for cultural care and Native-led cultural production.

Through his work at Leong Leong, Dominic has received recognition from The Architectural League of New York, the American Institute of Architects, Architectural Record, Dezeen, and The Architect’s Newspaper. The studio has exhibited internationally at the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, the Museum of Modern Art, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and the 2024 Smithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt. His work has been featured internationally, including in A+U, Abitare, The Architect’s Newspaper, Artforum, Cultured, the Los Angeles Times, Metropolis, The New York Times, Pin-Up, and Wallpaper.

Leong Leong’s notable projects include the Anita May Rosenstein Campus for the Los Angeles LGBT Center (2019), a campus of social services, affordable housing, and community space named The Architect’s Newspaper’s 2019 Public Building of the Year; the U.S. Pavilion for the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale (2014); and the 3.1 Phillip Lim Flagship in Seoul, South Korea (2010). Recent projects include the MoMA PS1 Courtyard Coalition in Queens, NY (2022), Hancock Park House in Los Angeles, CA (2023), and the Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion exhibition for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2024).

Dominic received his Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, where he graduated with honors, and a Bachelor of Architecture from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He has held invited faculty positions at Columbia University GSAPP, The Cooper Union, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2023, he was a featured practitioner in the Herbert Baumer Memorial Seminars at Ohio State University. He serves on the Board of Directors of The Architectural League of New York and has been an advisor to the MAK Center Centennial Council, the M+ American Friends Foundation, the Creative Time Summit 2024, and the Young Climate Prize for The World Around. He is a registered architect in the states of New York and Hawaiʻi.