Malkit Shoshan

Malkit Shoshan (born 1976 ) is a designer, author, lecturer and founder of FAST, an architectural think tank that addresses "the relationships between architecture, urban planning, and human rights."

Career
Shoshan studied architecture at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia.

Her interest in cross-disciplinary and multi-scalar work exploring the impact of urban planning, and human rights in conflict and post-conflict areas started in 2005 when she founded FAST alongside Michiel Schwarz, Willem Velthoven and Alwine van Heemstra as a response to a request raised by a Palestinian community of internally displaced persons named Ein Hawd that needed a planning alternative to the one imposed by the Israeli government.

In 2015, she was a finalist for the Wheelwright Prize, a $100,000 traveling fellowship awarded by the Harvard Graduate School of Design. One year later, Shoshan was named curator of the Dutch Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale with the exhibition "BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions".

In 2021, Shoshan won The Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for her collaborative project "Watermelons, Sardines, Crabs, Sands, and Sediments: Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip."

She is currently Area Head of the Art, Design, and the Public Domain Master in Design Studies at Harvard GSD and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU.

Publications
Shoshan's book Atlas of Conflict: Israel-Palestine was published in 2010. The book details Israel's emergence and Palestine's disappearance over the past hundred years.

She is the co-author of the book ''Village. One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise'' (Damiani Editore), a series of narratives based on the Ein Hawd experience. Among other publications, Shoshan published BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions (Actar) in 2023, a book based on the Dutch Pavilion she was curator of at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. The publication "traces the complex processes and mechanisms" behind the conduct of United Nations peacekeeping missions.

Her other publications include “Zoo, or the letter Z, just after Zionism” (NAiM, 2012), “Drone. UNMANNED. Architecture and Security Series” (Co-editor, DPR-Barcelona, 2016), “Retreat. UNMANNED. Architecture and Security Series” (Co-editor, DPR-Barcelona, 2020), “Spaces of Conflict” issue for Footprint, TU Delft Architecture Theory Journal (Co-editor, JAP SAM Books, 2017)and “UN Peace Missions in Urban Environments and the Legacy of UNMIL” (FAST, CIC-NYU, 2019).