MArch, University at Zagreb
MAPH, Division of the Humanities, University of Chicago

Zoka Zola was born in Rijeka, Croatia and is a licensed architect in the USA, the UK, and Croatia. In 1990 Zola received the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Award, an annual award presented to six students globally. After graduating from the Architectural Association she worked for a number of well-known studios in Vienna, Rome, and London. Later, Zola established her own studio in London designing small public projects and restaurants while she was teaching as senior lecturer at the Oxford Brookes University at Oxford and as Unit Master at the Architectural Association in London. In 1995, she received the Young Architect of the Year Award, an award given to one architect each year in the UK.

In 1997, Zola moved to Chicago where she first taught as adjunct professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and realized the Pfanner House. The house won the Home of the Year Award as the best house in North America by Architecture magazine and was recently included in American Masterworks: Houses of the 20th and 21st Centuries by Kenneth Frampton as one of 43 houses built in the USA since 1985. The studio's other work includes three zero energy houses (one in Chicago and two in Kuala Lumpur), a solar tower in Chicago, a Web 2.0 open source web site (www.OpenEcoSource.org), an urban plan for the entire city of Chicago, a number of prototypes for residential and educational buildings, a training center with hostel in China, a 750 feet tall infrastructure tower in California's desert, and most recently the realization of a winning competition proposal for affordable housing in Croatia.

Alongside her practice Zola is professor at the School of Architecture at University of Illinois Chicago. Zola's work is published and exhibited in numerous venues and publications on five continents. Zola occasionally gives lectures on her work and her ideas, runs seminars and speaks at conferences nationally and internationally.