Rayshad Dorsey

Rayshad Dorsey is an architectural designer, founding partner of Studio Rayshad Dorsey, cofounding director of the design collective Partners of Place — recipient of The Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers — and assistant professor of architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Through his teaching and practice, he explores how architecture can surface collective memory and cultural narratives, positioning spatial design as a lens for responsive and community-centered futures.

Dorsey holds a Master of Architecture with Distinction from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Clemson University. His academic honors include Harvard GSD’s Araldo A. Cossutta Prize for Design Excellence, Clemson’s Blue Key Leadership and Academic Award, and the Ray Huff Award for Excellence.

He is also a 2024–25 recipient of the ACSA Faculty Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture, where his research focuses on making visible and combating the intertwined challenges of climate change and gentrification facing the Gullah Geechee community and culture — aiming to bring critical attention and design-based responses to these urgent environmental and cultural injustices.

Professionally, Dorsey has contributed to projects at Atelier Cory Henry (Los Angeles), WW Architecture (Boston), Patterhn-Ives (St. Louis), and Höweler + Yoon (Boston), and collaborated with Toni Griffin’s Urban AC on the Land Narratives | Fantastic Futures exhibition at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale. His writing and editorial work includes serving as the invited editor and contributor to OBL/QUE no. 4 on anti-racist conservation discourse.

His ongoing research advances conversations at the intersection of architecture, culture, critical conservation, and environmental justice. Through his teaching, he advocates for inclusive, culturally sensitive, and socially impactful design approaches.