He holds a BArch from the University of Louisiana, an MArch from the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and a PhD in architectural history and theory from Princeton University. In 2009 and 2010, he was a fellow of Princeton's Society of Woodrow Wilson Scholars, and in 2010 and 2011, he was a fellow of the Getty Research Institute. He has published on the history, devastation, and reconstruction of Berlin, Beirut, Kabul, and New Orleans. He was a cocurator of the exhibition Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X–197X and curator of the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennial in South Korea. Fontenot's interdisciplinary work has been exhibited at Documenta, the Netherlands Architecture Institute, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, A + D Museum, and the Venice Biennale.