Zahra Safaverdi owns St. Sa.

Zahra Safaverdi is a practicing architect, a visual artist, founder of “St. Sa.”, current director of the MASKS initiative, assistant professor of architecture at Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, and a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at WashU. Her disciplinary work in “St. Sa.” explores methods of using architecture as a proxy for collective cultural memory, to bring different historical and geographical points to closer proximity, and to materialize human forces often invisible. With the MASKS initiative, she constructs a framework for young designers, practitioners, theorists, and historians in architecture and its intersecting disciplines to foster pedagogical experimentation. In addition to scholarly pursuits, Zahra has been involved with the practice of architecture for over a decade, working with a wide range of clients from the intimate scale of single-family housing, small adaptive reuse projects and fit-outs for non-profit organizations to a broader scale of institutional buildings and Google’s campus in Cambridge.

Zahra holds a graduate degree in Architecture from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Architecture, Magna Cum Laude, from CalPoly San Luis Obispo. She is the recipient of the American Institute of Architecture design award, ACSA Architecture Education award, Harvard GSD’s James Templeton Kelley thesis prize, Morphosis design award, Cal Poly’s thesis prize and president’s medal. She has been a Dean's Merit Scholar at Harvard University, has held the Irving Innovation and Teaching fellowship at Harvard GSD, the Schidlowski emerging faculty fellowship, an architecture residency at Art Omi, a residency and the Wilder Green Fellowship in Architecture from the MacDowell, an artist residency at the Ragdale Foundation, and the residency at the Boghossian Foundation’s Villa Empain.

Zahra has co-chaired the ARCC’s 2023 international conference, has given lectures widely, and served as a design critic at several institutions including Harvard GSD, Yale SoA, MIT, Cornell AAP, and Rice SoA. Her writing and projects have been featured in the Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of History of Ideas, OBL/QUE, Platform, Acadia, Crop, and Archinet among others. Recipient of numerous grants, her work and design contributions have been featured globally in Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, Houston, Kent, Knoxville, Locarno, Los Angeles, London, Lubbock, Madrid, Mexico City, New York, Saint Louis, San Louis Obispo, Vancouver, and Venice.