Wendy Ornelas
Wendy Ornelas
Licensed Architect/Faculty Member, Condia + Ornelas Architects/Kansas State University

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

B.S. Architecture (1980)
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  • Ornelas is a licensed architect in both California and Kansas and teaches architecture, marketing, management and professional practice at Kansas State University. She met her husband, a fellow architecture student, at Cal Poly, and they started their own architecture firm in 1984.
  • She was elevated to the American Institute of Architects’ College of Fellows in 2005, making her the first and only female and first and only Latina fellow in the state of Kansas.
  • She is the recipient of numerous awards including being named a Distinguished Professor of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. In 1989, while completing her graduate work at Oklahoma State University she earned second place in the Paris Prize/Lloyd Warren Fellowship and became the first woman to achieve that high of an award in the competition.
  • An excellent teacher, she was the recipient of the ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching Award, and APDesign’s McElwee Faculty Teaching Award. Wendy is also active in the AIA and is a past-president of AIA Kansas and recipient of the AIA Kansas’ Henry W. Schirmer Distinguished Service Award.
  • She has worked to champion diversity and inclusivity in architecture. She was the Central States Regional director for the AIA and co-chair of AIA National’s Diversity and Inclusion Council from 2012-14. She was the instigator of the AIA Kansas’ young architect’s leadership program and is the faculty advisor for both APDesign’s Women in Design and their newly formed Latinos in Architecture organizations.
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Notable CSU Alumni in building, design & construction

building, design & construction
San Luis Obispo