Aga Khan Program Lecture: Nora Akawi, “Traversing Territories”

Nora Akawi is an architect and curator currently living in New York. She is the director of Studio-X Amman, a platform for public programming, research, and education on architecture in the Arab region, initiated by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Columbia Global Center in Amman. She teaches graduate design studios, history/theory and visualization courses on borderlands, forced displacements, erasures, and counter-mapping at Columbia University’s GSAPP. Nora co-curated Friday Sermon, the Bahrain Pavilion exhibition in the Biennale Architettura 2018 in Venice. She has co-edited the books Friday Sermon (Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities, 2018) and The Arab City: Architecture and Representation (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016). Nora is a member of affiliated faculty at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, and of the steering committee for the Sijal Institute for Arabic Language and Culture in Amman. She completed her professional degree in Architecture (B.Arch) in Jerusalem, Palestine in 2009. In 2011, she received her MSc. in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (Msc. CCCP) from Columbia University. Her thesis, which received the CCCP Thesis Award, focuses on the role of the archive in the formation of transformative spatial imaginaries in Palestine.
This event is supported by the Aga Khan Program at the GSD.