Samia Henni

Samia Henni is a historian and an exhibition of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag 2017, 2022, EN; Editions B42, 2019, FR), and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (If I Can’t Dance, Framer Framed, edition fink, 2024), and the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022) and War Zones (gta Verlag, 2018). She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as Performing Colonial Toxicity (Amsterdam; Zurich; London; New Haven; Berlin; Ottawa, 2023–25), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22), Archives: Secret-Défense? (ifa Gallery, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2021), and Housing Pharmacology (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020). Samia was an invited tutor at the first Biennale College Architettura 2023 at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, “The Laboratory of the Future,” at Venice Architecture Biennale. She received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction, ETH Medal) from ETH Zurich and has taught at Cornell University, Princeton university, ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and Geneva University of Art and Design. Currently, she teaches at McGill University and co-chairs Columbia University Seminar’s Beyond France. She is working on an exhibition project Psychocolonial Spaces commissioned by Ar/Ge Kunst in Bolzano to be inaugurated in May 2025, as well as a book project Fanon for Architects as part of Routledge book series Thinkers for Architects.