Catherine Wilmes is an Assistant Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture. Her current research investigates the entanglement of architecture with media, representation, art history, and contemporary photography. This work is shaped by photographic inquiry into the built environment and material experimentation through making.

As the recipient of Cornell University’s AAP Design Teaching Fellowship for the 2023–24 and 2024–25 academic years, Wilmes developed a body of academic work centered on the theories and pedagogies of media, image-making, and architectural representation. She taught seminars on photography, drawing, and visual analysis that examined how architectural knowledge is constructed, mediated, and contested through visual practices. Within this work, she curated the exhibition Identity Crisis (2024) and directed SIGHTLINES (2025), a symposium on architectural representation and photography, alongside other student exhibitions developed as pedagogical tools for collective learning.

She has previously taught core and advanced architecture studios, seminars in theory and representation, and media courses at Cornell University, Pratt Institute, and Syracuse University.