Zahra Safaverdi

Zahra Safaverdi is a practicing architect, founder of “St. Sa.,” director of the MASKS initiative, assistant professor of architecture at Sam Fox school of Design & Visual Arts and faculty affiliate at Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at WashU. Her disciplinary work in “St. Sa.” 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 often invisible. 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, Safaverdi has been involved with the practice of architecture for over a decade, working with wide range of clients from the intimate scale of single-family housing, small adaptive reuse project and fit-outs for non-profit organizations to broader scale of institutional buildings and Google’s campus in Cambridge.

Safaverdi holds a graduate degree in architecture from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Architecture, magna cum laude, from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She is the recipient of the American institute of Architecture design award, ACSA architecture education award, Harvard Graduate School of Design’s James Templeton Kelley thesis prize, Morphosis design award, Cal Poly’s thesis prize and president’s medal. She has been a dean’s merit scholar at Harvard University — where she also held the Irving innovation and teaching fellowship. She has also held the Schidlowski emerging faculty fellowship, an architecture residency at Art Omi, a residency and the Wilder Green fellowship in architecture from the MacDowell, an artist residency at the Ragdale Foundation, and the residency at the Boghossian Foundation’s Villa Empain.

Safaverdi has co-chaired the ARCC’s 2023 international conference, has given lectures widely, and served as a design critic at several institutions including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Cornell, and Rice. Her writing and projects have been featured in Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of History of Ideas, OBL/QUE, Platform, Acadia, Crop, and Archinet, among others. The recipient of numerous grants, her work and design contributions has been featured globally in Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, Houston, Kent, Knoxville, Locarno, Los Angeles, London, Lubbock, Madrid, Mexico City, New York, St. Louis, San Louis Obispo, Vancouver, and Venice.