Italian architect and curator Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli has been named as President of the International Jury of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Alongside President Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, the International Jury is composed of the Palestinian architect and curator Nora Akawi, the American director and curator of The Studio Museum di Harlem Thelma Golden, the South-African founder and co-editor of Cityscapes Magazine, Tau Tavengwa, the Polish Izabela Wieczorek, architect in Spain and a researcher and educator based in London.

The composition of the Jury has been deliberated by the Board of Directors of La Biennale di Venezia upon recommendation by Lesley Lokko, the Curator of the 18th Exhibition, titled The Laboratory of the Future.

The 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale will be held in Venice in Giardini and Arsenale venues from May 20th to November 26th, 2023.

Giardini, image © Andrea Avezzù, courtesy of Venice Architecture Biennale

The International Jury will award the following official prizes: "Golden Lion for best National Participation", "Golden Lion for best participant in the International Exhibition, The Laboratory of the Future" and "Silver Lion for a promising young participant in the International Exhibition The Laboratory of the Future."

The Jury may also award "a maximum of one special mention to National Participations" and "a maximum of two special mentions to the participants in the International Exhibition, The Laboratory of the Future".

The Awards Ceremony will take place in Venice on Saturday, May 20th 2023.

Read on to learn more about the jury members of the International Jury, with short biographies provided by Venice Architecture Biennale:

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli. Image © Federico Scaglia

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli (president)

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli is an architect and curator based in Milan. He is the founder of 2050+, an interdisciplinary agency moving across technology, politics, design, and environmental practices. Latest projects include Synthetic Cultures at the 10th Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam; the short film diptych Riders Not Heroes; the exhibitions Aquaria at MAAT in Lisbon and Penumbra in Venice; the design for the space of the Fredriksen’s collection at the National Museum of Norway in Oslo; and the transformation of La Rinascente’s modernist building icon in Rome. Ippolito curated Open, the Russian Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2021, and co-edited the accompanying collection Voices. Towards Other Institutions (2021), which puts forward alternative forms of constituencies and collectiveness. 

In 2018, he co-curated Manifesta’s 12th edition, The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence in Palermo and edited Palermo Atlas, the preparatory investigation on the Sicilian capital (2018). Between 2007 and 2019 he has worked as architect and partner at OMA where his work has focused on research and curation, scenography and preservation. Ippolito teaches at the Royal College of Arts in London Data Matter, a research and design studio exploring the entangled relationship between data and the material world. His work has been shown and published internationally in various media, institutions, festivals, and exhibitions.

Nora Akawi. Image © Carmen Maldonado

Nora Akawi 

Nora Akawi is a Palestinian architect and curator living in New York. She is an assistant professor of architecture at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and a co-founding partner in the interdisciplinary research and design studio interim. She co-curated the Pavilion of Barhain at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, titled Friday Sermon (2018). 

Her teaching and research focus on transcontinental South-South anti-colonial solidarity and on architecture’s role in erasure and bordering in settler colonialism, drawing from border studies, critical geography, and archive theory. Nora taught at Columbia University’s GSAPP, where she was the director of Studio-X Amman and initiated the Janet Abu-Lughod Library and Seminar. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Faktur: Documents and Architecture and InForma, the peer-reviewed architecture publication of the Universidad de Puerto Rico.

Thelma Golden. Image © Julie Skarratt

Thelma Golden (United States) 

Thelma Golden is the Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, the world’s leading institution devoted to visual art by artists of African descent, where she began her career in 1987 before joining the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988. She returned to the Studio Museum in 2000 as Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs and was named Director and Chief Curator in 2005. 

She serves on the Board of Directors for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Barack Obama Foundation, Crystal Bridges Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She holds a B.A. in Art History and African American Studies from Smith College. She was appointed to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House by President Obama in 2010.

Tau Tavengwa. Image © Samer Moukarzel

Tau Tavengwa (Zimbabwe)

Tau Tavengwa is the co-founder, curator and editor of Cityscapes, a hybrid annual publication that showcases different ideas, and narratives on the built environment and cities globally from Africa, Latin America, and South Asia perspectives. 

He’s a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) (2018), an Aspen Global Leadership Fellow, a Research Fellow in Advanced Visualization at Max Planck Institute (2019-2023), and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics' LSE Cities from 2020-22. He is also the Curator-at-Large at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and was curator of the 2022 Lisbon Architecture Triennale’s Multiplicity exhibition. With Edgar Pieterse, he is a co-founder of the CS Collective.

Izabela Wieczorek. Image courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Izabela Wieczorek (Poland)

Izabela Wieczorek is a registered architect in Spain, and a researcher and educator based in London. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Reading, where she is the Director of the Master of Architecture Programme and the acting Research Lead for Architecture. She was a co-director of an award-winning Madrid-based office Gálvez+Wieczorek Arquitectura (2003-2016). 

Her work has been presented in several publications, including ‘Cartographies of the Imagination’, London (2021), ‘Works+Words Biennale of Artistic Research in Architecture’, KADK, Copenhagen (2019), and the Spanish Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia Exhibition (2018). She curated the In-Between public lecture series at Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Denmark (2013-2016).  

Read more about WAC's coverage about pavilions on Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.

Top image: Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli. Image © Federico Scaglia.

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