Mohsen Mostafavi was born in 1954 and is an Iranian-American architect and educator. He is the Dean and a Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has been the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University, and the Chairman of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
Mostafavi received a diploma in architecture from the Architectural Association in 1976 and undertook research on Counter-Reformation urban history at the Universities of Essex and Cambridge. Previously, he was Director of the Master of Architecture I Program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Mostafavi has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University, and the Frankfurt Academy of Fine Arts (Städelschule).
Dean Mostafavi serves on the steering committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the board of the Van Alen Institute, and on numerous university committees including the Harvard University Committee on Common Spaces and is currently involved as a consultant on a number of international architectural and urban projects.
His research and design projects have been published in many journals, and he is the writer of numerous books including Approximations (AA/MIT, 2002); Ecological Urbanism (Lars Müller Publishers 2010), and Nicholas Hawksmoor: London Churches (Lars Müller Publishers 2013).