studio:institute is an international collaborative practice at the nexus of architecture, urban design and curatorial practices.

Shehrazade Mahassini – she/her

Her biography, born in France to a German-Syrian mother and a Moroccan father, always made her question cultural and space production in this increasingly globalised world.
After her studies at the Bauhaus University Weimar, she worked in Cologne, Berlin, London, and Zurich. In 2022, she founded studio:institute, believing in a practice that includes critical and transdisciplinary research where the intersectional lens on the built environment helps (re)discover and explore (new) typologies – between representation, negotiation, and appropriation. Parallel to her practice, Shehrazade is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. Her research focuses on intersectional curatorial practices and space production in the Middle East, North Africa and Southwest Asia. Embedded in post/colonial studies, Arab and Afro-feminism, her research aims to create a new narrative and questions the historicity of space production in former colonies and how it relates to segregated urban spaces in contemporary Western society. Most recently, she has taught at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne – EPFL.