Ala Tannir

Ala Tannir is adjunct faculty at Carnegie Mellon Architecture and an independent architect and curator from Beirut. She received a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut, and a Master in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has worked at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and La Triennale di Milano among others.

She is currently the inaugural Curatorial Research Fellow at the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Heinz Architectural Center, as well as Adjunct Studio Faculty at the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. She was part of the curatorial team and Managing Editor of Publications for the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, How Will We Live Together?, for which she co-edited two books titled Expansions and Co-Habitats (La Biennale di Venezia, 2021). She also co-organized the XXII Triennale di Milano titled Broken Nature (2019)—an exhibition that looks at design’s potential for repairing humans’ broken bonds with the environment—and co-authored its accompanying catalogue.

She was previously involved in organizing several exhibitions, installations, and publications including Design and Violence and This is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good at MoMA. Her writings have been published in Arabic, English, French, and Italian, and have been featured in Migrant Journal and Bidayat Magazine among others.