Jeanne Autran-Edorh is a French-Togolese architect and co-founder of Studio NEiDA. She worked with a number of critically acclaimed Pritzker Prize-winning Architecture studios including Herzog & de Meuron, Ateliers Jean Nouvel and Studio Francis Kéré, where she led the firm’s largest civic projects, including the Benin National Assembly and the Thomas Sankara Memorial. Her interest in contemporary African architecture, material innovation and collaborative building processes shape her signature design and building sensibility. Her architecture is in conversation with its environment,indigenous expertise and craftsmanship. Underpinning her work is the understanding that architecture is not an insular discipline but one that must acknowledge its political and socio-economic impact. In recent years Jeanne has expanded her design and building practice with teaching engagements, as she sees a need to broaden how architecture is taught and speak about topics that were mostly absent in her own training - including non-european approaches to design, the complexity of sustainable building and an architectural history that contains multitudes. 

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Fabiola Büchele is an Austrian creative manager and curator who has worked both independently and for numerous cutting-edge designers, contemporary art practitioners and producers across three continents. Following four years as Studio Francis Kéré’s Creative Director, she co-founded Studio NEiDA.

After her journalism studies in the UK and New Zealand, she spent five years working independently as a writer and curator out of Vietnam, followed by a posting for the Kamel Lazaar Foundation in Tunisia. Her work highlights and fosters media and creative practices that question and shift prevalent Euro- and male-centric interpretation of public discourse around contemporary art, culture and design and their respective histories.

She addresses the exclusion of the majority world from mainstream pop culture to broadsheet journalism, from design of public space to art making and displaying. She is guided by the ambition to turn creative ambitions into viable business structures that nonetheless have an artistic edge, identity and critical impact.

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