ACSA Announces 2023-2024 Recipients of JAE Fellows Program

Aya Musmar is a transdisciplinary scholar, pedagogue, and writer. She is interested in rethinking the concepts and artistic methods by which architecture bears testimony to spatial and material manifestations of injustice. Her research looks beyond the materiality given in a space and considers the meticulous cosmic, environmental, and social intimacies of everyday life residing within minor spaces to address complex power structures. Working across the realms of teaching and research, her scholarship explores how an understanding of forced displacement indexes architecture with new subversive vocabularies that transgress the disciplinary definitions of the aesthetic. In 2020, her PhD dissertation, Witnessing the Refugee Camp: Feminist Positions, Practices, and Pedagogies, was shortlisted for the RIBA President’s Awards. Aya has co-led several international research projects that addressed mobility, conflict, climate change, and heritage among displaced populations in Jordan. In 2022, she was a visiting fellow in the Urban Lab at University College London (UCL) and the Story Lab at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). She is an assistant professor of architecture and feminism at the University of Petra in Amman. She publishes her work in both Arabic and English.

Althea Peacock is a founding partner and co-director of LEMONpebble Architects and Urban Designers, a Johannesburg-based practice. A professional architect based in Johannesburg, South Africa, she is a graduate of the School of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Her research interests revolve around the politics of archive and erased identities, particularly in the context of racialized spaces. Althea engages in a constant dialogue about being a black woman architect in post-apartheid spaces, examining its implications on issues of identity, marginalized history, feminist practice, and spatial politics. Within her practice, she is interested in how these themes manifest and are explored in projects and built infrastructures.

Beyond her architectural pursuits, Althea’s interests span a broad range of disciplines. She is passionate about exploring spatialized ethnographies, pedagogy, poetry, photography/film, counter-cartographies, and alternate narratives, all of which inform her spatial praxes and affirm architecture as a political act.

Althea Peacock’s contributions to the architectural community extend beyond her professional practice. She has served as an invited juror for national architectural awards and a speaker at conferences. Additionally, she has been a guest critic at various universities for several years, blending her research, architectural expertise, and writing practice into her engagements.

Albert Chao is an architect, artist, educator, and tinkerer based in Buffalo, NY. In his design and research practice, Albert interrogates in/visibilities of labor within the field and subverts norms embedded within typical ways of working in architecture. Using disciplinary tools and processes, he seeks to make more visible the forgotten histories and narratives of marginalized voices.

Albert is a licensed architect in the state of New York and is currently building a practice based on social justice principles. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a dual Masters of Architecture and Fine Arts from the University at Buffalo. He teaches design studios, media classes, and seminars at the University at Buffalo, School of Architecture and Planning, and is also a core organizer with Dark Matter U, collaborating with a BIPOC-led network to develop anti-racist models of architectural education and practice.