Nana Biamah-Ofosu is an architect, writer and director of YAA Projects, an architecture, design and research practice dedicated to exploring counter-histories, material and diasporic culture, through making, speaking and writing architecture.
YAA Projects engages in intelligent and contextually rich projects, centring peripheral identities to create a more inclusive, holistic understanding of the built environment. Recent projects include Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa at the 18th Venice Biennale which was selected as part of ArchDaily’s ‘Top 2023 Pavilions and Installations Interrogating Architecture of the Global South’, the ArchiAfrika Pavilion and Althea McNish: Colour is Mine, which was included in The Guardian’s ‘Best Designs and Designers of 2023’.
As part of Curator’s research team at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia , Nana contributed to the articulation of the main exhibition and Pinpoint, an archive of African and African Diaspora practitioners focused on decarbonisation and decolonisation.
Nana has lectured widely in U.K and internationally, including at the inaugural Venice Biennale College Architettura, Kingston University and currently at the Architectural Association. She has been a critic at Harvard Graduate School of Design and an invited speaker at Princeton University. She has served on the juries of several awards including the RIBA Silver Medal award and currently holds advisory roles in architecture institutions.
Her practice explores identity, geography, communality and diasporic culture through the lens of building, dwelling and material cultures. She has been researching African compound housing as a building, spatial and material typology which can inform the development of future housing and urbanisms with a book due for publication later this year. Her practice, YAA Projects recently presented Common, Communal, Community an exhibition in Vienna showcasing evolving this research.
As a writer, she is interested in the social, political, and cultural impact of design and architecture and engages with leading practitioners in contemporary practice, defining a critical, expansive, and open discourse on the built environment.