Azra Akšamija, Ph.D. is an Austrian artist and architectural historian, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and based in Boston, US. Since September 2026, she is professor and institute head at the IZK Institute for Contemporary Art, Graz University of Technology. She holds a concurrent appointment as Professor in the MIT Department of Architecture, the Art, Culture and Technology Program, where she leads the Future Heritage Lab.
Akšamija's artistic practice and academic research examine how art repairs and recomposes social life afterrupture the contexts of war and displacement, colonial dispossession, and technological change. For two decades she has made participatory and material works that regenerate broken cultural practices and the social bonds they carry, asking what art contributes to the survival of culture that documentation and preservation cannot. She authored two books, Mosque Manifesto: Propositions for Spaces of Coexistence (Revolver, 2015) and Museum Solidarity Lobby (Revolver, 2019), and edited two volumes, Architecture of Coexistence: Building Pluralism (ArchiTangle, 2020) and Design to Live: Everyday Inventions from a Refugee Camp (MIT Press, 2021, co-edited with R. Majzoub and M. Philippou).
Her artistic work has been exhibited in leading international venues, including the Generali Foundation and the Secession in Vienna, the Biennials of Venice, Liverpool, Valencia, and Manila, Manifesta 7, the Museums of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Ljubljana, SculptureCenter and the Queens Museum in New York, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Jewish Museum Berlin, and the design festivals of Milan, Istanbul, Eindhoven, and Amman. Most recently her work has been shown at the Kunsthaus Graz, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, and the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2021 and 2025.
Akšamija holds master's degrees in architecture from Graz University of Technology (2001) and Princeton University (2004), and a Ph.D. in history, theory, and criticism of architecture from MIT (2011). Her professorship at the IZK returns her to the school where she trained as an architect. She received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2013 for her design of the prayer space in the Islamic Cemetery Altach, Austria, the Art Award of the City of Graz in 2018, and an honorary doctorate from Montserrat College of Art (2020).
