Zahra Safaverdi

Zahra Safaverdi is a practicing architect, founder of “St. Sa.,” current director of the MASKS initiative, assistant professor of architecture at Sam Fox School, and a faculty scholar at the Center for Environment at WashU. Her trans-disciplinary projects take a phenomenon (scientific or cultural, geological and geographical) as a point of departure, building narratives that are visualized, materialized, and spatialized to make complex or lesser-known systems more perceptible. With the MASKS initiative, she constructs a framework for young designers, practitioners, theorists, and historians in architecture and its intersecting disciplines to foster pedagogical experimentation. In addition to scholarly pursuits, she has been involved in the practice of architecture for over a decade, working with a wide range of clients, from the intimate scale of single-family housing, small adaptive reuse projects, and fit-outs for non-profit organizations to the broader scale of institutional buildings and Google’s campus in Cambridge.

Her ongoing design-research work and creative practice have received support from Harvard University, the Boghossian Foundation, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the Lambert Arts and Culture program, the Scholarship Catalyst program, and the Sam Fox School. She has been a Dean’s Merit Scholar at Harvard University, has held the Irving Innovation and Teaching Fellowship at Harvard GSD, the Schidlowski Emerging Faculty Fellowship, an architecture residency at Art Omi, an artist residency at the Ragdale Foundation, a residency and the Wilder Green Fellowship in Architecture from the MacDowell, and a residency at the Boghossian Foundation’s Villa Empain.

She has co-chaired the ARCC’s 2023 international conference, given lectures widely, and served as a design critic at several institutions, including Harvard GSD, Yale SoA, MIT SA+P, and Cornell AAP. Her writing and projects have been featured in the Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of History of Ideas, The Kenyon Review, OBL/QUE, Platform, Acadia, Crop, and Archinet, among other publications in print. Her work has received numerous awards, including an AIA design award, ACSA Architecture Education award, and Harvard GSD’s James Templeton Kelley thesis prize. Her disciplinary presence has a global reach, and the contributions have been featured in Austin, Berlin, Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, Houston, Kent, Knoxville, Locarno, Los Angeles, Lubbock, Madrid, Manchester, Mexico City, New Orleans, New York, St. Louis, San Louis Obispo, Vancouver, and Venice.