Iman Fayyad is founding director of projectif, an award-winning research practice that explores architectural geometry’s relationship with material economy, sensory perception, and the politics of physical space and building practice. Her writing and design work have been published and exhibited in venues including the New York Times, Technology: Architecture and Design, Nexus Network Journal (Architecture and Mathematics), Log, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Carnegie Museum of Art, citygroupNY, and the Roca Gallery in London. Her public work and research on zero-waste geometric construction techniques have received recognition by the Architects’ Newspaper Best of Design Young Architects Prize, the ACSA Faculty Design Award, and Architizer’s Design For Good Award. She is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow.

Her recent work studies how contemporary culture—digital technologies, the climate crisis, and accessibility standards— have impacted the relationship between the parallel labors of design and construction. During her time in Rome, Fayyad will expand on her research in tectonics and representation to study similarities between stonecutting practices, stone assemblies, and surface-oriented geometric constructions of sheet materials.

Previously, Fayyad served on the faculty at Syracuse, MIT, and Princeton. She holds a BSc from MIT and an MArch with distinction from Harvard University.