Zahra Safaverdi
Lubbock, TX
Visual Art
Zahra Safaverdi creates, curates, educates, and practices architectures. Her interdisciplinary work explores methods of using architecture as a proxy for collective cultural memory, to bring different historical and geographical points to closer proximity, and to materialize human forces often invisible. She is the founder of “St. Sa.”, current director of the MASKS initiative, and an assistant professor of architecture at Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at WashU where she works on constructing integration between design studio pedagogy, varied definitions for materiality, methodical representation, and politics of visualization. She is the recipient of the American Institute of Architecture Design Award, the ACSA Architectural Educator Award, Harvard GSD’s James Templeton Kelley thesis prize, and the Morphosis design award. She has been a Dean's Merit Scholar at Harvard University, has held the Irving Innovation Fellowship at Harvard GSD, the Schidlowski Emerging Faculty Fellowship, the architecture residency at Art Omi, and the MacDowell Fellowship. Her writing and projects have been featured in the Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of History of Ideas, OBL/QUE, Platform, Acadia, and Crop, among others. Her work and design contributions have been exhibited globally in Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, Kent, Knoxville, Locarno, Los Angeles, London, Lubbock, Madrid, New York, and Venice.