The Jury

Sumayya Vally is a South African architect and the founder and principal of Counterspace. Raised in Laudium, South Africa, Vally studied architecture at the University of Pretoria and earned her master’s at the University of the Witwatersrand. She founded Counterspace in Johannesburg in 2015, driven by how rarely the places and communities she knew appeared in her architectural education. Now working between Johannesburg and London, she draws on African and Islamic traditions of gathering, migration, and worship as sources of architectural form.

Vally became the youngest architect to receive the Serpentine Pavilion commission. Her pavilion opened in London in 2021. In 2023, she served as artistic director of the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah and received an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. In 2026, she received an Art Basel Awards medal for her work across architecture, art, and curation.

Didier Fiúza Faustino is a French-Portuguese architect and artist. Faustino grew up between Paris and his family’s village near Lisbon. He traces his freedom to move between art and architecture to those early years spent moving between two countries. After graduating from the École d’architecture de Paris-Villemin in 1995, he began a practice centered on the body and on how architecture can expose, protect, or constrain the people who inhabit it. In 2002, he co-founded the Bureau des Mésarchitectures in Paris with Pascal Mazoyer.

Faustino has taught at London’s Architectural Association. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2018, the Académie des beaux-arts awarded him the Prix Pierre Cardin for Architecture. In 2022, France named him a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

George Arbid is a Lebanese architect, architectural historian, and founding director of the Arab Center for Architecture in Beirut. Arbid studied architecture at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts and earned a Doctor of Design from Harvard University in 2002. Alongside his teaching at the American University of Beirut, he devoted his research to the architects and buildings that shaped modern Lebanon. In 2008, he co-founded the Arab Center for Architecture to help preserve the drawings, photographs, and personal archives through which the region’s architectural history can be written.

In 2014, Arbid co-curated Bahrain’s national pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale with fellow juror Bernard Khoury. A decade later, he received the Mohamed Makiya Prize for Architecture, awarded by Tamayouz in recognition of his contribution to documenting and preserving modern architecture across the Arab world.

Yasmina Mahmoud is a Lebanese architect, curator, and creative director whose practice operates at the intersection of architecture, politics, and cultural production. Her work explores latent relationships between seemingly disparate ideas, disciplines, and people, constructing new narratives through curation and creative direction. She is particularly interested in translating these connections into spatial, visual, and experiential forms.

Following her studies at the American University of Beirut, she worked with the Arab Center for Architecture and Bernard Khoury / DW5, contributing to architectural, editorial, and exhibition projects.

As co-founder of Archifeed, she leads the platform’s development and visibility across the MENA region, expanding its curatorial and educational reach.

Her curatorial works have also extended to international exhibitions and were presented as part of We Design Beirut.

Across these different contexts, she engages with collaborative pedagogy, film, and architecture as tools for constructing narratives, challenging established perceptions, and questioning whose stories are told, and by whom.

Bernard Khoury is a Lebanese architect and the founder of Bernard Khoury / DW5. Born in Beirut in 1968, he studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and Harvard University. He returned to Beirut in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War, expecting to take part in the city’s reconstruction. His first opportunities to build came instead from private clients in the nightlife industry. Those early commissions shaped a question that runs through his practice to this day. What can an architect do with the ambitions of a client and the political realities of a site?

In 2001, Khoury received an honorable mention for Rome’s Borromini Prize, followed by the Architecture + Award in 2004. He co-founded the Arab Center for Architecture in 2008 and served as architect and co-curator of Bahrain’s national pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Teymour Khoury is an architectural curator, educator, and designer whose work operates at the intersection of architecture, cultural production, and public discourse. His practice focuses on how architecture is documented, narrated, and exhibited as a living cultural condition rather than a static professional output.

He is the founder of Archifeed, a platform dedicated to supporting emerging architects through exhibitions, interviews, workshops, and educational programming that connect academia, practice, and the public. His curatorial work frequently engages questions of modernity, heritage, conflict, and material culture, with a particular focus on Lebanon and the broader Arab region.

Khoury has co-curated and developed multiple exhibitions and research initiatives examining architecture as a social and political artifact, exploring how buildings, objects, and urban conditions carry layered histories of production, social conditions, and transformation.

Alongside his curatorial work, he teaches and collaborates with academic institutions and cultural organizations, developing studios, public programs, and interdisciplinary projects that position architecture as a tool for critical inquiry.

His work advocates for a locally grounded yet globally engaged architectural culture, foregrounding research, documentation, and exhibition-making as essential practices in shaping how architecture is understood today.