Mohamad Nahleh is Assistant Professor of architecture at The Ohio State University and founder of Nightrise. His work confronts imperial and capitalist regimes of illumination by reclaiming night as a primary site for architectural and political inquiry. His scholarship appears in Places, The Avery Review, The Funambulist, and Volume, and his forthcoming book Nightrise is supported by the Graham Foundation. Centered on southern Lebanon as a borderland laboratory where aerial occupation, scorched earth doctrine, and racialized surveillance converge, Nightrise shows how imperial projects attempt to universalize their own optics by conquering the night through flares, curfews, phosphorus, and drones, while villagers counter these incursions through a practice of 'darkness as architecture' that reorganizes spaces, songs, crops, and kinship around an endangered atmosphere.
While at MacDowell, Nahleh developed an installation for Amman Design Week, opening in October 2026, and worked on revisions for Nightrise, forthcoming with Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.
