Mohamed Elshahed

Mohamed Elshahed is a writer, curator, and critic of architecture, his work extends to design and material culture. He is the author of Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide (AUC Press, 2020) and was the curator of Cairo Modern at New York’s Center for Architecture (October 2021–March 2022). He is the author of Rebellious Things: A History of Modern Egypt in Objects. He earned a Masters from MIT’s Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and a PhD from NYU’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies. He is the curator of the British Museum’s Modern Egypt Project and of Modernist Indignation, Egypt’s winning pavilion at the 2018 London Design Biennale. In 2019 Apollo Magazine named him among the 40 influential thinkers and artists in the Middle East. In 2011 he founded Cairobserver, a fluid project with six printed magazines distributed for free to stimulate public debates around issues of architecture, heritage, and urbanism. Mohamed was a 2023 Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington DC. In 2023-2024 he was a fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas & Imagination in Paris.