Professor Lesley Lokko is the founder and director of the African Futures Institute @african_futures_institute(AFI) in Accra, Ghana, an independent postgraduate school of architecture and public events platform. She was the founder and director of the GSA , University of Johannesburg (2014—2019) and the Dean of Architecture at the Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture (2019—2020). She is the editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and editor-in-chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture. In 2004, she made the successful transition from academic to novelist with the publication of her first novel, Sundowners (Orion 2004) and has since followed with twelve further bestsellers. She is a founding member of the UN-Habitat Council on Urban Initiatives; a member of the 17th International Jury of the Venice Architecture Biennale and a trustee of the London-based Architecture Foundation.
Sumayya Vally is the Principal of @_counterspace , a Johannesburg-based architecture and research studio. Sumayya’s design, research and pedagogical practice is searching for expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. Her work is often forensic, and draws on the aural, performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. She is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the youngest ever architect of the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/1. She has recently worked on initiating and developing Support Structures for Support Structures at the Serpentine, an initiative which supports and networks artists working at the intersections of arts and ecology, arts and social justice and arts and the archive.
Sumayya is the current Pelli Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the Illinois School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and was recently named to the TIME100 Next list celebrating 100 emerging leaders shaping the future.
www.counterspace-studio.com
www.lesleylokko.com
www.africanfuturesinstitute.com