Zahra Safaverdi creates, curates, educates, and practices architectures. Her disciplinary 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 that are often invisible.
She is the founder of This Living-Room, current director of the MASKS initiative, and an assistant professor of architecture at Texas Tech University where she works on constructing integration between design studio pedagogy, varied definitions for materiality, and methodical representation in relation to the practice of architecture.
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 at KSU, and the architecture residency at Art Omi. 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.
While in residence, she worked on 19 dioramas encapsulating synthetic landscapes and their architectural counterparts.
