Kent Kleinman is a distinguished architect, scholar and longtime higher education leader.

Prior to joining Brown University in 2022, Kleinman was the Provost at Rhode Island School of Design. From 2008 to 2018, he served as the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University and professor in the Department of Architecture. He was a faculty member at the University at Michigan from 1989 to 1999; Chair of Architecture at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1999 to 2005, and the founding Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons School of Design, The New School from 2005 to 2008. Kleinman has taught at institutions internationally including the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin, the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, and the ETH in Zürich.

Kleinman received his professional degree in architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. His scholarly focus is 20th-century modernism, and his books include Villa Müller: A Work of Adolf Loos; Rudolf Arnheim: Revealing Vision; The Krefeld Villas: Mies’s Haus Lange and Esters; Aftertaste; and a translation of Jan Turnovsky’s Poetics of a Wall Projection.  He was awarded a Mellon Foundation Senior Public Goods Fellowship in 2002, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Center for Architecture in 2005. He has received four Graham Foundation Grants, the national Bruner Prize, two Architect’s Journal 10 Best Books awards, a New York Council for the Arts grant, and a Progressive Architecture Design Award with Eric Sutherland. 

He received the American Institute of Architects New York State Educator Honor Award in 2012, and was recognized as a Top 25 Most Admired Educator by Design Intelligence in 2016 and 2018. He was a co-principal investigator on a grant from the Mellon Foundation focused on integrating architecture and the humanities in the study of urbanism. Kleinman is a registered architect in California.