Yasmine Abbas

  • Assistant Teaching Professor of Architecture

424 Stuckeman

Yasmine Abbas

Biography

Yasmine Abbas is a French architect, researcher, and educator who is exploring how neo-nomadism affects the practice of design and the experience of place. She is the author of Le Néo-nomadisme: Mobilités, partage, transformations identitaires et urbaines (FYP, 2011). Her varied art and design engagements are vehicles to interrogate how an increasingly mobile, cosmopolitan, and connected population can meaningfully inhabit a world in flux. Her work has been published as chapters in edited books: Ecologies du Smartphone (Le Bord de l’Eau, 2021), The Ghosts of Transparency: Shadows Cast and Shadows Cast Out (Birkhaüser, 2019), Technologies numériques du soi et (co-)constructions identitaires, (l’Harmattan, 2009), and in journals Volume, MONU, AA Files, New Geographies, and Architectural Design.

With DK Osseo-Asare, Abbas co-founded the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform project, or AMP, as a hybrid design and research collaboration between their practices, Panurban and Low Design Office. The work has received numerous awards including the 2017 Social Economic and Environmental Design (SEED) Award and the 2020 Le Monde Cities Urban Innovation Award – Citizen Engagement Prize. AMP has been exhibited internationally, at the 2017 Seoul Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism, and as commissioned installations for the Center for Art and Media – ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (Exhibition: Digital Imaginaries: Africas in Production, 2018), the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Switzerland (Exhibition: Repair Revolution! 2023), and the Biennale Architettura 2023: The Laboratory of the Future, Venice, Italy.

Her multicultural background and international work experience in Africa and the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North America have informed her creative approach to research and teaching, for which she received an Innovator Award from the Center for Pedagogy in Art and Design at Penn State (2018).

Prior to joining Penn State, where she directs the Immersive Environments Lab, Yasmine held positions as chair of design management at Paris College of Art, as module lead of digital culture at the Ecole des Ponts Paris-Tech, and as an associate professor at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, France.

Abbas holds a Doctor of Design from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Master of Science in Architecture Studies from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.