The Knowlton School is pleased to announce that Samiha Meem will be the 2023–24 Howard E. LeFevre ’29 Emerging Practitioner Fellow beginning autumn 2023.

Samiha Meem is a designer, writer, and educator. Taking pop iconophilia and mythmaking seriously as architectural artifacts and systems, her research focuses on “autospace:” simulacra of so-called original material conditions formed through a combination of explicitly personal metanarratives, the confined spectacle of images, and the contemporary social economy of (over)sharing.

Her writing—from cemeteries to cult labor to cloud subscriptions—has been published in venues including the Journal of Architectural Education, e-flux,  and Dune. Her work and collaborations have been featured in New York Magazine, Interview Magazine, Vogue.com, Dezeen, The Architect’s Newspaper, and Art Metropole; as well as presented at Nuit Blanche Toronto, La Centrale, and La Biennale di Venezia.

Meem holds an MArch from McGill University and a BArch from the University of Waterloo. She has previously taught at McGill and lectured at the AA School. She has worked in award-winning architecture practices in New York, Toronto, and Montréal and collaborates with artists, architects, and institutions through her visual studio Meem Land.

As the LeFevre Fellow, she will be pursuing a research-based project on cultural reality production through the exploitation of falseness under model collapses in intelligence infrastructures.

The Howard E. LeFevre ’29 Emerging Practitioner Fellowship was established in 2000. The purpose of the fellowship is to widen the disciplinary discourse and to invigorate teaching at the school with a broad range of ideas. The LeFevre Fellowship provides an individual with a nine-month residency to investigate a specific project related to his or her overall development, produce an exhibit and lecture concerning the work, and develop their ideas within the context of teaching an architectural design studio.