Acciavatti studied architecture, first at the Rhode Island School of Design, and then at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where he was awarded the Frederick Sheldon Fellowship. He holds a PhD in history and history of science from Princeton University and was the Sherley W. Morgan, Class of 1913 Fellow.

Anthony Acciavatti is a founding partner of Somatic Collaborative and has worked in North America, Asia, and Europe.

His book, Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River (awarded the 2016 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize), is a dynamic atlas of the Ganges River basin—the first such comprehensive atlas in half a century—based on a decade of fieldwork and archival research begun as a Fulbright Fellow in 2005. His account of irrigation, geography, population, and climate is the basis of a traveling exhibition that has appeared in museums and biennials in India, Italy, Holland, Ecuador, and South Korea.

Acciavatti’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Princeton University, Yale University, and his work on the Ganges by a J. William Fulbright Fellowship as well as grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation and Harvard University.

Acciavatti is a founding editor of Manifest: A Journal of American Architecture and Urbanism. His work has been published in The New York Times, Cabinet, Architectural Design, Topos, The Indian Express, and Bracket among others.

He is currently the Daniel Rose Visiting Assistant Professor in Urban Studies at the Yale School of Architecture. Prior to joining Yale he taught at Columbia and Princeton universities as well as the Rhode Island School of Design.