Shehrazade Mahassini is an artist, architect, researcher and educator working at the nexus of architecture, art and curatorial practice. After graduating with a BA from the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne and an MSc from the Bauhaus University Weimar in Germany, she worked in Berlin, London, and Zurich. 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. In 2022, she founded studio:institute, a spatial practice embedded in 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 School of Architecture, Royal College of Art in London. Her research focuses on the colonial continuum of water extraction in Libya and the broader SWANA region. Embedded in decolonial studies, Arab and Afro-feminism, her research aims to create new narratives and questions the historicity of space production in former colonies and how it relates to segregated urban spaces in contemporary Western society. In 2023, she taught at the Superstudio at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). She is currently an associate lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London and at the Chair of Affective Architectures led by An Fonteyne at the ETH Zurich, and a visiting lecturer at the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture and the City led by Tatjana Schneider at the Technische Universität Braunschweig.