Faculty 

Aspasia Kouzoupi is an architect and landscape designer with degrees from AUTH, ETH Zurich (MAS in Landscape Architecture), and the National School of Fine Arts, Athens. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Thessaly and was a postdoctoral fellow at NTUA (2019–2022) supported by the Greek State Scholarship Foundation. Her research explores diachronic mapping, infrastructural palimpsests, and Mediterranean socio-natural ecosystems in the context of the Anthropocene. A founding member of "Sculpted Architectural Landscapes: Golanda + Kouzoupi," her work—spanning teaching, research, and built projects—has been published internationally across architecture, landscape, and art platforms.
​Hiba Bou Akar teaches in the Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP. Her research focuses on planning in conflict and post-conflict cities, urban security and violence, and the role of religious political organizations in shaping urban space. Her award-winning book For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (Stanford UP, 2018) examines how Beirut’s peripheries have been transformed through planning amid ongoing conflict. She currently leads the Post-Conflict Cities Lab, which investigates the entanglements of planning, pacification, and development in contested urban settings across the MENA region. At the Institute, she is working on Sedimentary Urbanization, an ethnographic and archival project exploring how low-income Lebanese families and Syrian refugees access affordable housing in Beirut’s outskirts.​​
Dina Stamatopoulou is a stage director, actress, playwright and Applied Theatre educator and practitioner. As the Head Designer of Educational and Creative Programs at the National Theatre of Greece Youth Stage, she has designed and/or led workshops for over 20,000 adults and students, and trained 300+ educators and artists as in-the-field practitioners, implementing Theatre in Education, Community and the Workplace. With a diverse academic background in History and Theatre, her work focuses on Theatre for Tangible Change, designing community-based, intergenerational projects supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture. Dina has directed a wide range of performances and authored award-winning plays for youth. Her practice explores anticolonial frameworks, ecotheatre, and systems thinking, fostering collective resilience and inclusive futures through performative collaboration.
Eray Çaylı, PhD (University College London, 2015), is Professor of Human Geography with a Focus on Violence and Security in the Anthropocene at University of Hamburg. His work interweaves geography, anthropology, and material/visual culture to explore the role that physical environments and their images play in political violence and defiance in Turkey and its environs, and among their diasporas. His publications include the monographs Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan (2025, University of Texas Press), Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey (2022, Syracuse University Press), the award-winning İklimin Estetiği: Antroposen Sanatı ve Mimarlığı Üzerine Denemeler [Climate Aesthetics: Essays on Anthropocene Art and Architecture] (2020, Everest; in Turkish; expanded edition reprinted in 2023), and the anthology Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement and Catastrophe (2021, Bloomsbury/I.B.Tauris). He is one of the editors of the Journal of Visual Culture.
Agata Lisiak is an Associate Professor of Migration Studies at Bard College Berlin and Research Associate at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is the writer, host and producer of Spatial Delight, a ten-part podcast about space, society and power. She works at the intersection of urban sociology, migration research, feminist theory, and cultural studies. She has published on migrant motherhood, urban girlhood, walking in the city, and everyday urban cultures, among other topics. Her most recent research engages with the writings of Rosa Luxemburg and Doreen Massey on the politics of space. Agata has been active in a number of feminist networks and initiatives, including the Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice project, which she convened, and she is currently one of the editors of Feminist Theory. 
Petros Perrakis Kollias is a PhD Candidate in the University of Aegean, Dpt. of Environment. With an academic background in environmental anthropology (MSc. Anthropology, Environment and Development, UCL) as well as in the History and Philosophy of Science (BSc. History and Philosophy of Science, NKUA), his research revolves around themes of critical and posthumanist theory, environmental history, and anthropology, with a particular interest in exploring the making of landscapes through the lens of more-than-human histories. His current focus is the Axios Delta, through which he aims to tell a story of complex, contingent co-creation—without losing sight of the asymmetries and consequences embedded in the uneven distribution of power, or the wider abstract forces at play.
Anthí Kosma's research focuses on drawing as an improvisational act, sentimental writing, and embodied experience beyond media. This investigation began with her PhD-DEA from the School of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (2014, Cum Laude and Special Mention) and continues through her teaching experience as a Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the University of Thessaly since 2019, at TransArt Institute since 2021 as a PhD advisor, and through the blog and workshops of "imprográfika," as well as her architectural works, drawings, and writings