Albena Yaneva was born in Bulgaria, and educated at the University of Sofia and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris in 2001. She is the recipient of academic grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago (2003), the British Academy (2008) and the EU (2008-2010).
Albena Yaneva has published extensively in the field of anthropology of art and architecture, spanning the disciplinary boundaries of architectural theory, sociology, science studies and political philosophy. Her work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. In 2010 she was awarded the RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding University-located Research.
Albena Yaneva is a member of the Peer Review College of the AHRC and the ESRC, and reviews proposals for the National Science Foundations of USA, Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands. She performs review service for several international peer-reviewed journals; serves as a Ph.D. external examiner and tenure reviewer, book proposal reviewer for Routledge and Ashgate; sits on the Editorial Board of the international journal City, Culture & Society (Elsevier).