Aleris Rodgers is a founding partner of Studio VAARO. Prior to moving to Toronto, she worked for a number of international architecture practices including, most recently, Herzog & de Meuron. During her time with HdM she was based in both their Basel, Switzerland and Hong Kong offices, working on the design and construction of the M+ Museum of Visual Culture. She holds a BA in psychology from Harvard University and a Master in Architecture from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Reza Nik is the founding director of SHEEEP - a licensed architect, artist and educator based in Toronto, Canada.  Reza has a background in Art History and he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Teaching Stream at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. His research is focused on a deeper dialogue between the socio-political nuances of the urban context and playful experimentation. Disrupting the traditional architectural processes and institutions is at the forefront of his pedagogy and practice.

Prior to founding SHEEEP, Reza worked with experimental practices like Coop Himmelb(l)au in Vienna & the Living Architecture Systems Group led by Philip Beesley in Toronto. He has also worked with various more traditional architectural studios in Barcelona, Buenos Aires & Toronto along with design-build projects led by Sergio Palleroni in India and Argentina. The social impact of Architecture is something he has been investigating for over a decade.

Reza is also one of the founding members and the co-steward of the Toronto chapter of the Architecture Lobby, an organization advocating for labor rights for architectural workers and encouraging more critical discourse within the profession. 

Miles Gertler co-founded the design-research office Common Accounts with Igor Bragado in 2015. Their work examines the intersections of the body with spaces both online and IRL. They are recognized for their work in the design of death and the virtual afterlife, including Three Ordinary Funerals, a prototypical funeral home produced for the 2017 Seoul Biennial on Architecture and Urbanism, now in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea (MMCA).

Recent lectures by Common Accounts include Wishful Tropics at Alserkal Avenue in Dubai, Max Out at the Harvard GSD, and Gangnam, Muscle, and Death at the MMCA's Superhumanity Symposium in 2017. Common Accounts have contributed to publicationssuch as E-flux, Room One Thousand, and FRAME Magazine, and have been included in recent books Imminent Commons: The Expanded City (ed. Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Jeffrey Anderson), and Superhumanity: Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity (ed. Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Jihoi Lee).

Recent exhibitions include a commissioned series of images for the Dutch Pavilion, Work, Body, Leisure, at the 2018 Venice Biennale in Architecture, Imago Mundi, a show of Canadian artists mounted by the Fondazione Benetton in Venice, Rare Item, at Toronto's Corkin Gallery, and Going Fluid at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial.

Gertler has taught at Cornell AAP's New York City Studio and the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. He is represented as a visual artist by Corkin Gallery and is the recipient of the Suzanne K. Underwood Prize and the Henry Adams A.I.A. Certificate from Princeton University. He received an MArch from Princeton, and a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo.

Sam Dufaux is an architect and principal at SvN Architects+Planners in Toronto. Dufaux currently leads key firm projects and research across all scales with a focus on the integration of architecture, landscape, and ecological systems for a post-carbon world.

Prior to joining SvN, Dufaux was an associate principal at WORKac in New York City, where, for 10 years, he led many of the firm’s built projects, public works, and commercial and residential projects.

Dufaux received his master’s degree from Columbia University in New York after earning his Bachelor of Architecture in Switzerland, where he is a licensed architect. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, Dufaux taught advanced design studios at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.

Behnaz Assadi is a landscape designer and a founding partner at Ja Architecture Studio. She began teaching at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design in 2017. In addition to her position at Daniels, Assadi has taught studios at Cornell University and the Cooper Union in New York. 

In her practice and teaching, she explores landscape architecture’s agency beyond disciplinary confines with a particular interest in landscape processes and how they relate to the built environment. She uses a multi-scalar frame of investigation, modelling, drawing and mapping ecological systems with the formal and tectonic precision of architectural construction drawings to combine ecological literacy with design specificity across disciplines.

Her current multidisciplinary practice, professional experience at offices such as OMA and educational background provide her with versatility and comfort in crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries to teach and practice in both landscape architecture and architecture.

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 also won the OAA Headquarters Landscape Design Competition (pictured).

JA’s work has been published widely and exhibited both nationally and internationally. 

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

Petros Babasikas is an architect and educator. His design work and research build architecture and public space against the climate crisis. His teaching and curricular projects explore the intersection of design with the liberal arts, global leadership and community engagement. He is Director of the Honours Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies program at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. He is also the founder of Babasikas Office, based in Athens and Toronto.

Some of his recent projects include the Archipelago Thesis Studio, exploring emergency architectures, activism, resilience and shelter in global peripheries; ATHENS 2030, centred around blue/green infrastructures and DIY urbanisms for the historic centre of Athens; and the Aegean Marine Life Sanctuary on the island of Leipsoi. Additionally, he has worked on the Kapnergati Square Area & Park in Kavala, Greece. developed the multimedia installations Rock, Drip and Oneiroi, participated in the collective storytelling project Depression Era, and organized the public space and infrastructure walks/talks 6Place Toronto.  He is currently designing low-footprint houses in Greece and Canada and a series of adaptive reuse interventions for EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens.

Babasikas has taught architecture and urbanism at the University of Patras in Greece. He is an associate member of IADAS and vice-chair of UWC Greece. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University.

Mauricio Quirós Pacheco, born in Costa Rica, is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, and the founding partner of MIAU Studio, an architecture firm practicing in Costa Rica and Canada. He holds a Master of Architecture in Urban Design, with distinction, from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Architecture (Best Thesis Award) from Universidad del Diseño.

From 2010 to 2014, Mauricio worked with then-director Mirko Zardini at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). He has practiced architecture and urban design in the Americas and Europe with offices including Stanley Saitowitz Office and the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. He has served as a guest critic at various universities, including Yale University and the Sam Fox School of Architecture, and as a guest juror for international competitions such as Architecture for Humanity’s Crossing Borders competition and the International Open Competition for FUNDECOR Headquarters.

Mauricio sits on the Editorial Board of Manifest: A Journal of American Architecture and Urbanism, and his writings have appeared in publications such as Domus, San Rocco, and the Architectural Observer. In 2016, he co-curated the symposium Modern Architectures in Central America with Hans Ibelings, and in 2024, both—together with the collaboration of Andrés Fernández—published Modern Architectures in Central America, an overview of 20th-century modern architecture in the region.

Fiona Lim Tung is a designer and educator. She received her Master of Architecture from the the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, and was named to the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Honour Roll upon graduation.

Fiona has taught and coordinated courses at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, the University of Waterloo, and in the interdisciplinary post-graduate program at the Institute Without Boundaries, at George Brown College.

Fiona’s research practice deals with issues of representation and feminism. Her design practice focuses on the potentials that exist in the overlap between high and low-tech fabrication methods in contemporary craft. Her work has been widely published in magazines, in books, and exhibited in galleries nationwide.

Nicholas Hoban is a computational designer, roboticist, fabricator, and educator. He works at the intersection of computational design, robotics, construction and simulation in pedagogy, research, and practice. Nicholas is the Director of Applied Technologies at the Daniels Faculty and a lecturer within the Daniels technology specialist program, leading various research and teaching labs while developing curriculum for studios and seminars on advanced fabrication and robotics within architecture. His research focuses on the application of robotics within fabrication and construction, and how we can solve critical problems in geometry through integrated processes.

Professionally, Nicholas was an associate at Mesh Consultants Inc., a geometry studio and consultancy in Toronto specializing in solving critical problems in geometry through custom algorithms, software, and simulation. Nicholas has worked for the legislative assembly of Ontario on the LiDAR 3D scan database for the digital façade archive of Queens Park.

Nicholas received his Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours from the University of Manitoba, his Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University, his Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto and his Master of Advanced Studies in Architecture and Digital Fabrication from ETH Zurich.

Peter Sealy is an architectural historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through indexical media such as photography. He holds architecture degrees from the McGill University School of Architecture and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he was a Frank Knox fellow. He recently completed his PhD at Harvard on the emergence of a photographic visual regime in nineteenth-century architectural publications, seen through the lens of truth — in both architecture and its representations.

Peter’s research on Émile Zola and the immateriality of 19th century iron buildings was recently published in Function and Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century (Routledge), a volume he co-edited with Paul Dobraszczyk. He has presented at numerous scholarly conferences, including those of the AAH, CAA, EAHN, INHA, RIBA, SAH, and SAHANZ. His articles have appeared in Abitare, Border Crossings, Canadian Architect, Domus, Harvard Design Magazine, The Journal of Architecture, and Oris, and in several edited volumes, including Blackwell’s Companion to the History of Architecture. Previously, he worked at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) on exhibitions including Actions (2008) and Journeys (2010). Recently, he studied the resurgence of model photography and photomontage in contemporary architectural representation as a Mellon Researcher at the CCA.

Current research projects include a study of the Berlin Wall in film, and a forthcoming article on the iterative nature of re-mediated design practices.