Emanuel Admassu and Olalekan Jeyifous delivers this year’s Fall Open House Lecture, followed by a conversation with Dean Andrés Jaque.
Emanuel Admassu (’12 MSAAD, ’13 AAR) is an assistant professor at GSAPP and a founding partner, with Jen Wood, of AD—WO, an art and architecture practice based in New York. As a practicing architect, urbanist, and educator, Admassu’s work explores the intersections of spatial justice and urbanism, with a special focus on the African continent and the African diaspora. Prior to joining GSAPP, Admassu taught at RISD and Harvard GSD. He is also one of the founding board members of the Black Reconstruction Collective.
Olalekan Jeyifous received a BArch from Cornell University and is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work reimagines the intersections of architecture, community, and the environment through inventive visual storytelling. By merging physical and digital elements with both historical and speculative contexts, his practice offers critical reflections on existing systems while imagining alternative ways of relating to each other and the spaces we inhabit. His art has been exhibited at major institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Vitra Design Museum, and Guggenheim Bilbao, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and SFMOMA.
In addition to an extensive exhibition history, he has spent over two decades creating large-scale public installations and was co-commissioned to design a monument to Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm for New York City’s She Built NYC initiative.
His distinctions include the 2024 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the Silver Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2021 United States Artists Fellowship in Architecture and Design, the 2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize, and two NYFA Fellowships. He has also been awarded residencies at MacDowell, The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and he currently serves as the 2026 Brooklyn Botanic Garden Heidi Nitze Fellow.
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