Lesley Lokko
Incoming Dean, Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture
The City College of New York

Lesley Lokko is an architect, academic and the author of ten best-selling novels. She is currently Director of School at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture from 1989–1995, and gained her PhD in Architecture from the University of London in 2007. She has taught at schools in the US, the UK, Europe, Australia and Africa. She is the editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Culture, Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2000); editor-in-chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture and is on the editorial board of ARQ (Cambridge University press). She has been an on-going contributor to discourses around identity, race, African urbanism and the speculative nature of African architectural space and practice for nearly thirty years. She is a regular juror at international competitions and symposia, and is a long-term contributor to BBC World. In 2004, she made the successful transition from academic to novelist with the publication of her first novel, Sundowners (Orion 2004), a UK-Guardian top forty best-seller, and has since then followed with eleven further best-sellers, which have been translated into fifteen languages.

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