Nadi Abusaada

Biography

Historian, architect and curator Nadi Abusaada is ETH Zürich Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zürich (2022–ongoing). He was previously an Aga Khan Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Architecture and Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA (2021–2022). His research interests include the foundations of the architectural profession in West Asia between 1900 and 1950, the history of national exhibitions in the modern Arab world, and the intersection between photographic practice and representations of the natural landscape in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Abusaada served as curator for Al Ma’rad (The Exhibition), Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah (2022). He is also the co-founder of Arab Urbanism, a global network focused on historical and contemporary urban issues in the Arab region (2019–ongoing).

His writing has been featured in the International Journal of Palestine Studies (2022), International Journal of Islamic Architecture (2021), Architectural Review (2020, 2021), Scroope: Cambridge Architectural Journal (2020), Kings Review (2020) and Jerusalem Quarterly (2019, 2020), and he has contributed chapters to K. Sanchez and S. Zananiri, eds., Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens 1918–1948 (Brill, 2021), and Y. Anani, ed., Palestine from Above: Imaging the Landscape through Surveillance and Cartography (Qattan Foundation and Institute for Palestine Studies, 2021).

He has received book publishing and art exhibition grants from Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah (2022), a visual arts grant from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, Beirut (2022), and an art exhibition grant from the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah (2022). He has also been awarded research fellowships by the Palestinian Museum, Birzeit (2020–2022), and Palestinian American Research Center, Ramallah (2020–2022).

He earned a BA (Hons) in Architectural Studies from the University of Toronto (2016) as well as a MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies and a PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge (2017 and 2021, respectively).

Born in 1995 in Jerusalem, Abusaada lives and works in Zurich and Ramallah.

SAF participation:
March Meeting 2023