Leen Katrib is an architectural designer, researcher, and educator whose work investigates present and historical practices of the built environment that have marginalized communities and erased their histories and material culture.
Her research has been supported by the Harry der Boghosian, the Paul and Daisy Soros, the Howard Crosby Butler Travel, the George H. Mayr Travel, and the William and Neoma Timme Travel fellowships.
Her work has been published in Future Anterior, Pidgin, Room One Thousand, and Bracket, and has been exhibited at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Van Der Plas Gallery in New York, the A+D Museum in Los Angeles, and a forthcoming exhibition at Slocum Hall in Syracuse.
She holds a M.Arch from Princeton University and a B.Arch from the University of Southern California. She is a forthcoming, tenure-track assistant professor of architecture at University of Kentucky. Prior to teaching, she practiced architecture in NYC and completed funded independent research in France, China and Jordan.
During her residency at MacDowell, Leen completed an essay titled "Less is Negative." The essay re-examines Mies van der Rohe's design for the Illinois Institute of Technology campus expansion to trace the mechanics underpinning the myth of its autonomous positivity and to hypothesize its entanglement with other postwar campus expansions into primarily Black and immigrant neighborhoods. The essay contextualizes a recent exhibition Katrib opened at Syracuse University (2022) to provoke a new way for architects to reconceive campus commemoration projects from an inert memorial to a subversive archival project.
