Samia Henni
Samia Henni is an architect, historian, and exhibition maker working on built, destroyed, and imagined environments. She is the author of Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara, and the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty and War Zones. She has curated exhibitions including Psychocolonial Spaces (2025–), Performing Colonial Toxicity (2023–2025), Discreet Violence (2017–2022), Archives: Secret-Défense? (2021), and Housing Pharmacology (2020).
She received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction, ETH Medal) from ETH Zurich. She has taught at several institutions, including ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, Geneva University of Art and Design, the University of Technology Sydney, Cornell University, and Princeton University.
Henni was an invited tutor at the first Biennale College Architettura (2023) during the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, The Laboratory of the Future, at the Venice Architecture Biennale. She has held several invited academic appointments, including Visiting Professor (2023–2024) at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich; inaugural Albert Hirschman Chair (2021–2022) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Marseille; Visiting Professor (Fall 2021) at the Institute of Art History, University of Zurich; and Geddes Fellow (Spring 2021) at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. She currently teaches at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture.
