Supplied photos

The John H. Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is delighted to announce new tenure-track appointments in the landscape architecture and architecture programs: 

• Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream Behnaz Assadi (effective July 1, 2026)
• Assistant Professor Ang Li (effective July 1, 2026)

“Daniels is pleased to welcome two innovative scholars whose interdisciplinary practices span landscape processes, material culture, and trans-scalar research. From plant-scale inquiry to urban installations, each brings new insight into how built environments can be shaped, understood and reimagined,” says Mason White, dean of the faculty. “Both Assadi's and Li's research and scholarship on built ecologies across scales will strengthen the ties between our programs.”

Behnaz Assadi is a landscape designer and a founding partner at JA Architecture Studio. She has taught at Daniels since 2017, first as a sessional instructor and later as an assistant professor. She has also taught studios and seminars at Princeton University’s School of Architecture, the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union and Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP), both in New York City.

In her research and teaching, Assadi investigates the agency of landscape processes in relation to the built environment. She is particularly interested in the dynamic interplay between structured and predictable architectural forms and unpredictable and often messy ecological systems, an interaction that she believes can lead to new and exciting architectural tectonics and foster design agency in our climate-forward landscape sensibilities. Working across scales, she combines mapping, drawing and model making with the precision of architectural representation to analyze ecological systems and translate them into design proposals. Her work seeks to bring ecological intelligence into architecture and architectural precision into landscape while operating across disciplinary boundaries.

Her professional experience, including her time at OMA Rotterdam, together with her research and practice, informs an approach that moves fluidly between architecture, landscape architecture and urban design. This reciprocal relationship between practice, research and teaching allows her to engage multiple disciplines while maintaining a focus on ecology, representation and tectonic precision.

At JA, Assadi positions 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 produced a dynamic repertoire of built works, research projects and award-winning competition entries. The latter includes the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau (2015), the Guggenheim in Helsinki (2015), the Kaunas Concert Center (2017), five Canadian Architect Awards (2015, 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2023) and three Progressive Architecture Awards (2021, 2022 and 2023). In 2022, JA was named an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York and a Design Vanguard winner by Architectural Record. In 2024, the practice won the OAA Headquarters Landscape Design Competition and, most recently, the Queen’s Park North A Shelter for Conversation competition. JA’s work has been published widely and exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Ang Li is an architectural designer who joins the University of Toronto from Northeastern University where she held the appointment of associate professor. She is the founder of Ang Li Projects, an interdisciplinary design practice that works at the intersection of art, architecture, material culture and construction ecology to investigate the maintenance rituals and material afterlives behind the modern built environment. Her work unfolds across scales and media to include material research, designed objects and furniture, architectural installations and public space interventions that are held together by an interest in exploring alternative cultures of making centered around repair, reuse and recirculation.  

Li’s work has been featured in national and international exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2024), the United States Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023), the Boston Public Art Triennale (2022), Exhibit Columbus (2021), the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019), the Villa Terra Decorative Arts Museum (2018), and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2013), among others. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Art Omi, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residence), Landmark Columbus and the Boston Public Art Triennial.

Prior to her U of T appointment, Li held faculty positions as a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and as the 2015/16 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo. She has also worked as an architectural designer for several international design practices in New York, London and Stockholm on a range of cultural and infrastructural projects. 

Li holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Cambridge.