A trained architect, M K Aaref has more than a decade’s worth of experience in alumni relations and fundraising. In addition to managing his own design practice, Aaref was involved in managing the American Alumni Association and was the founding Director of the Edward M Kennedy Center for Public Service and the Arts (the EMK Center). His experience also includes working with other non-governmental organizations such as literary and arts festivals, academic foundations, and entrepreneurship development organizations. He was recognized by the US State Department for his outstanding achievement for the establishment of the EMK Center. He goes by ‘Aaref.’ 

Aaref’s involvement at the Daniels Faculty is to nurture connection and engagement with alumni, donors, stakeholders and like-minded design professionals. Through dialogue and opportunities to volunteer and provide philanthropic support, Aaref looks forward to engaging a community of donors, friends and alumni who would like to see the highly esteemed Daniels Faculty reach new heights through its programs in architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, forestry and visual studies.

Kanwal Aftab is a lecturer in the Urban Design program at the John. H Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Her professional work focuses on the design and phasing of equitable public infrastructure in new urban growth centres, presently as an urban designer with the city of Brampton. Her academic research looks at the pedagogical influence of systems thinking and systems art on environmental design professions in the second half of the 20th century.

With degrees in both architecture and landscape architecture, Kanwal has practiced design in the public and private sector in the United States, Canada, and Pakistan. She is a member of TUFLab, an urban form research laboratory at the University of Toronto, and a member of the editorial board of Ground Magazine, a quarterly publication of the OALA.

Mitchell Akiyama is a Toronto-based scholar, composer, and artist. His eclectic body of work includes writings about plants, animals, cities, and sound art; scores for film and dance; and objects and installations that trouble received ideas about history, perception, and sensory experience. Akiyama’s output has appeared in commensurately miscellaneous sources such as Leonardo Music Journal, ISEA, Sonar Music Festival (Barcelona), Raster-Noton Records (Berlin), Gendai Gallery (Toronto), and in many other exhibitions, publications, and festivals. He holds a PhD in communications from McGill University, an MFA from Concordia University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto.

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Erica Allen-Kim is an historian of modern architecture and urban design. Her work on global cities and cultural landscapes focuses on issues of memory and citizenship. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto. She is completing her first manuscript, Mini-malls and Memorials: Building Little Saigon in American Suburbs, and has published on Vietnamese-American war memorials and the transnational politics of Chinatown gates. Her current book project, Chinatown Modernism, situates the architectural and urban projects of American Chinatowns within the broader context of modern architecture and planning.

Kelly leads MASS Design Group’s London studio, overseeing work in East Africa and Europe. He joined MASS in 2014 to lead its Kigali office and grew the practice from eight employees to 80 over a five year period. Kelly has led the design and implementation of several of MASS’s projects across East Africa, notably the award-winning Munini District Hospital and Rwanda Ministry of Health’s Typical Hospital Plans; headquarters for both the One Acre Fund and Andela in Kenya; and the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture. Kelly is a graduate of the University of Toronto, a recipient of the Canada Council’s Prix de Rome for Emerging Practitioners, and has held teaching positions at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Harvard University, and the University of Waterloo.

The Daniels Faculty’s inaugural Assistant Dean, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Jewel Amoah is a Trinidadian-Canadian human rights advocate, activist and academic. Prior to joining the Faculty in July 2022, she served as the Human Rights & Equity Advisor for the Halton District School Board in Ontario. Throughout her career, Dr. Amoah has been committed to inspiring and producing systemic change that enhances access to justice and promotes the full enjoyment of rights by all.

A graduate of McMaster University, the University of Ottawa and the University of Cape Town. Dr. Amoah has facilitated such change in various domestic and international public-sector entities by raising awareness of harassment, discrimination, human rights and equity in teaching, learning and working environments. These environments have provided an opportunity to apply and expand her academic analysis of intersectionality and its impact on the attainment of equitable outcomes on the basis of race, gender identity, religion and disability, among other identity dimensions.

Apart from her work in Canadian legal, K-12 and postsecondary educational environments, Dr. Amoah has worked internationally as an advocate for the promotion and protection of human rights, good governance and gender equality in various African nations, including Sierra Leone, Malawi and Namibia. She has also been a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. Currently Dr. Amoah serves as a part-time Commissioner with the Ontario Human Rights Commission and is a member of the McMaster University Research Ethics Board. 

Christy Anderson studies and teaches the history of architecture. While most of her work focuses on the buildings of early modern Europe, her projects extend broadly across oceans and into contemporary design. A full-time member of the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto, and a member of the faculty at Daniels, she enjoys teaching both non-specialist undergraduates and students in the professional programs. Her most recent project is a study of the ship as an architectural type, which explores the spaces and environments that connect the sea to the shore. Ships facilitated global exchange and moved goods, people, and the natural world from port to port. The environment of the sea, the technology of design, the movement of commodities, and the shaping of cities all centre on the ship as mobile architecture. Christy has published a survey of Renaissance architecture (Oxford University Press, 2013) that treats buildings across Europe and rewrites the history of the field. Christy's earlier projects include a study of the relationship between architectural education and reading methodologies in the practice of the English architect in her book Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2006). She has also published on the complicated history of classicism and gender, the failure of architectural language, and the politics of wonder. In 2010, Christy was named a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in the field of architecture, planning and design. She received her PhD from MIT in the School of Architecture, and was a senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford University. In addition to teaching at the University of Toronto since 2005, she has also taught at Yale University, MIT, and the Courtauld Institute in London.

Anne-Marie Armstrong is an architect, educator and co-founder of AAmp Studio – a practice based in Toronto and Los Angeles. AAmp is an interdisciplinary design and architecture studio positioned at the intersection of architecture and media. Recent work ranges in scale – from branding & graphic identity, to residential, commercial and cultural spaces.

Prior to founding AAmp, Anne-Marie gained extensive professional experience on a range of notable projects at Gehry Partners, Marmol Radziner and Bestor Architecture in Los Angeles. Her research has been published in Thresholds Journal and Wallpaper Magazine. She is the assistant editor of Perspecta 42: The Real.

Anne-Marie earned a Master of Architecture from Yale University and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Waterloo. She attended Yale on a Fulbright Scholarship – and was awarded the H.I. Feldman Prize. She is a licensed architect in California and Ontario.

As Social Media Specialist, Richard Ashman manages the Daniels Faculty's official social media channels and creates compelling digital content that supports strategic initiatives. 

Richard is a dynamic professional who has led, directed, and fueled content creation and strategy across many areas and companies, including working with TIFF, Sony Music, McDonalds Canada, and the City of Toronto.

Richard has an Honours B.A. in Communications and Digital Media and additional trainings to complement his work.

Behnaz Assadi is a landscape designer and a founding partner at Ja Architecture Studio. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto.

Behnaz is interested in the unpredictability and open-endedness of landscape processes, large-scale interconnected ecological systems, and multi-scalar resilient design approaches that aim to mitigate the effect of climate change. Her work explores the agency of landscape architecture beyond disciplinary confines. Her current multi-disciplinary practice, professional experience at offices such as OMA, and her educational background, all provide her with a level of versatility and comfort in crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries to teach and practice in both landscape architecture and architecture.

In her teaching, Behnaz uses line drawings as a precise medium that combines the conventions of architectural detail drawings with the anatomical qualities of historic botanical illustrations. This creates a seamless continuity across the tectonic and the natural but also allows the medium to represent, investigate, and navigate the complexities of ecological processes with its spatial and temporal qualities. It is only through this meticulous exploration that the medium becomes; ‘The Language of Landscape’. Over the past several years, she has been teaching and coordinating two of the foundational core studios in the MLA program in the first and fourth semesters, as well as a number of graduate and undergraduate courses in both architecture and landscape architecture departments at Daniels.

Her practice Ja Architecture Studio, a Toronto-based practice, combines the rootedness of a local design firm with the broad interests of an international design studio whose work considers global themes. At Ja, Behnaz situates the studio’s architectural interest in iconography, geometry, form, and tectonic pursuits within the broader context of landscape, ecology, and climate change. The studio has achieved a repertoire of built works, research projects, and award-winning competition entries. The latter includes Bauhaus Museum in Dessau (2015); Guggenheim in Helsinki (2015), Kaunas Concert Center (2017); three Canadian Architects Awards (2015, 2018 & 2020) and most recently a winner in the 68th Annual Progressive Architecture Awards (2021). Ja’s work has been published widely and exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Behnaz holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from University of Toronto and a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from University of Tehran.