“I’m focused on design and health planning, project leadership, and driving innovation through research.”

Tanya Banagala’s exceptionally broad expertise encompasses health, workspace, tertiary education, sport, religious buildings, retail and residential. She has worked on projects in Australia and Sri Lanka, and is driven by a genuine passion for innovative healthcare design sparked by formative experiences of hospitals while her mum was ill. This has evolved into a strong focus on design and health planning, project leadership, and driving innovation through research, which are her day-to-day focus at CHC.

Tanya is articulate, hard-working and team-oriented. She’s motivated by a strong set of values around equity and fairness, which informs her design thinking and projects. It drives her involvement in CHC’s Indigenous Design Group, which is working to embed meaningful engagement and co-design on our projects with Traditional Custodians. It has also motivated her involvement in numerous industry organisations and initiatives, including the AIA’s student representative team SONA and its EmAGN committee and podcast, Hearing Architecture.

Creative to the core, Tanya is inspired by art and visiting contemporary art museums around Australia and the world. At school in Canberra she benefited from an unusually broad design education that included metalwork, welding, woodwork, jewellery, furniture-making and glasswork, and allowed her to design everything from an ergonomic computer mouse to an Environmentally Sustainable House. This opened up the world of architecture to her, which she still finds challenging, occasionally perplexing, and endlessly fascinating.