Tracing / Traces: Architecture and the Archive 2025

Zehra Ahmed is a researcher and writer based in Chicago whose work focuses on architectural history and culture in the modern Middle East and North Africa. Currently, she is developing an archive of projects and architects to expand knowledge of the Arab city and resurface its overlooked histories, typologies, elements, concepts, and modes of representation for contemporary design. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at UIC and the 2024–2025 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow. Prior to joining UIC, she earned an MA in the History and Theory of Architecture, where her research considered the history of postmodernism in a postcolonial context. She served as text editor for the publication Crown Hall Dean’s Dialogues 2012-2017, and her writings have been published in DAr, a journal that investigates the formal architectural values of the Islamic world, and Flat Out, a journal of design criticism on which she also serves as a member of the editorial board.

Dirk Denison is an architect, educator, and dedicated supporter of the arts. He trained at the University of Michigan, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Denison is the founding principal of Dirk Denison Architects, a Chicago-based firm recognized internationally for award-winning design that reflects the uniqueness of each client’s needs to live, work, learn, and create. He has been a tenured professor at IIT for over thirty years and serves as the Director of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP). His first monograph, Dirk Denison 10 Houses, was published by Actar in December 2018.

Anders Nereim is a Chicago architect and educator. After being a partner at Stuart Cohen & Anders Nereim Architects, he opened his own practice Anders Nereim Architects in 1988. Since first being awarded the Chicago AIA Young Architect Award in 1987, he has received numerous AIA awards for his architecture. He was the founding chairman of the Master of Architecture program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he remains Professor Emeritus in the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects.

Uthman Olowa is an educator, artist, and designer based in Chicago. Uthman earned his Master of Architecture degree from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from Binghamton University. Uthman recently worked as an AICAD Teaching Fellow at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, instructing undergraduate and graduate architecture courses. In addition to teaching, Uthman’s practice explores the ways architecture can serve as a tool to design spaces that support and affirm the rich cultural identities of Black and Brown communities.

Melissa Rovner is an educator and historian of the built environment. Her research focuses on intersections between material, labor, housing design, urban development, representation, and the formation of racial constructs in the production of spatial inequalities. She leverages forms of narrative and visualization in the urban humanities, such as “rebel archives,” “critical cartography,” and “digital thick mapping,” to influence the recovery of cultures and histories that were mischaracterized, displaced, condemned, or erased in the making of an Anglo-European vision of civilization under discourses of modernity and progress. Her scholarship bridges temporal and geographic boundaries, from global colonial translations of land and property through buildings and plans in the sixteenth–eighteenth century, to American Imperial expansionism in the nineteenth century and the uneven development of US cities at the start of the twentieth century.