Caroline O’Donnell received her B.A.(Hons) in architecture and B.Arch (with distinction) from the Manchester School of Architecture, England, where she was awarded the Heywood Medal for the most outstanding final year student. In 2004, O’Donnell received scholarships from Princeton University, the Fonds BKVB, Netherlands, and the Arts Council of Ireland in order to study for her masters at Princeton University. She received her M.Arch in 2006, and was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize for exceptional ability and talent in Architectural Design.

She has taught at the Manchester School of Architecture, England, and the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands. She has also acted as assistant-in-instruction to professors Peter Eisenman, Stan Allen, and Ralph Lerner at Princeton University in both theory seminars and design studios.

Since 2005, she has been Project Architect at Eisenman Architects in New York, where she has directed the design teams for several projects, including Hamburg Library (published in GA Document 91, June 2006), Pompei Santuario Railway Station, (exhibited at the 2006 Venice Biennale and published in GA Document 97, June 2007), and Stad Jean Bouin Rugby Stadium in Paris. From 2000-2004 she was project designer at Kees Christiaanse Architects and Planners, Rotterdam, where her main projects were the new polder city of Almere Poort (in collaboration with MVRDV), Amsterdam Sciencepark, and Groningen Train Station, (exhibited Rotterdam Architecture Biennial 2004).

O’Donnell has also participated in many international competitions, including collaborations with SMAQ (Andreas Quednau, Sabine Muller), Pasel-Kuenzel Architects, Mike Green, and Erana Samarasundera. The research project Tweak: Fear and Space, commissioned by Fonds BKVB, Netherlands and developed in collaboration with Shine 5.0, was exhibited in Design Dock, Rotterdam, 2004. The project Entropy Time Surface, one in series of ten sundials marking a path between the harbor and the stadium, commissioned by Manchester City Council, was exhibited in ‘Heliodays in the Rainy City’, at Urbis, Manchester, 2002. O’Donnell’s work has also been exhibited in Emerging Talents, Emerging Technologies at the 2006 Beijing Architecture Biennial, and at the RIBA Gallery, London, 1996. 

In 2000, O'Donnell was editor of the Manchester School of Architecture publication Manchester Architecture Papers (MAP) and is one of the founding editors of Pidgin Magazine – a new journal from the students at Princeton School of Architecture (www.pidgin-magazine.net). Her writing has been published in several architectural journals including Log, (Giraffes, Gibbons and Gibson, Log 8), Pidgin, (Diagram as Remedy: Decoding Freud’s Diagrams, in Pidgin 1, Unideal, in Pidgin 2), and MAP (Syn City, MAP 2001). As part of the project Groepsportretten Fear and Space, and in collaboration with Shine 5.0, she authored the chapter “Tweak: Fear as Imagination” in the book ‘Fear and Space’ (Nai Publishers).