Dr Catalina Mejía Moreno

Catalina Mejía Moreno is an architect and architectural humanities researcher with diverse interests situated at the intersections of architectural history, material, cultural and media studies, feminist theory and decolonial/anti-colonial thought.

She is trained as an architect at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, where she also spent some years in practice before arriving to the UK. She completed an MA in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and a PhD in Architectural Theory and Criticism at Newcastle University under the supervision of Prof Katie Lloyd Thomas and Prof Mark Dorrian. Her thesis ‘Returns – Towards a Photographic Criticism’ [Or, the case of the North and South American elevators and the Berliner Bild Bericht] establishes the ‘photographic canon’ as an architectural phenomena in itself, and suggests material practices to difference photographic canons, destabilise them and subvert their normalisation. An important part of her work has revolves around the relationship between architecture, criticism, theory, and its modes an ethics of representation.

Her research on photography and architecture has been funded by the DAAD and the Getty Research Institute. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montréal for the multidisciplinary research project Architecture and/for Photography (2016-7). She is the co-founder of the Interest Group ‘Building Word and Image’ at the European Architectural History Network (EAHN).

Her current research and teaching explores creative and critical practices to de-colonise, re-energise and re-examine architectural history and theory teaching and pedagogies. Initial iterations include Fielding Architecture: Feminist Practices of a Decolonised Pedagogy symposium (2019) and ‘To Manifest’ a collaborative intersectional feminist manifesto published in Harvard Design Magazine No.46 (No Sweat) (2018). Adopting a transnational and interdisciplinary approach, her wider academic interests include spatial practices and discourses of power and resistance through feminist and decolonial pedagogies and praxis, focusing on ‘how(s)’ and practicing of ‘otherwise.’

Part of her work is featured in the SSoA Feminist Library. She is also part of the Feminist School of Architecture, an initiative based at SSoA, as well as part of the Athena Swan and the Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity Committee. She has taught at the University of Brighton, Queen Mary University, Newcastle University and Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. She currently serves on the scientific committee of Dearquitectura (Dearq) peer reviewed journal from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and on the editorial board of Exploring Architecture from Birkhäuser.