2023 Biennale Jury Revealed

Although Lesley Lokko, curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, has already selected the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement — it will go to Nigerian polymath Demas Nwoko — it is up to the international jury to parse Lokko's exhibition and the dozens of national pavilions to determine a trio of prizes:

• Golden Lion for best National Participation
• Golden Lion for best participant in the International Exhibition The Laboratory of the Future
• Silver Lion for a promising young participant in the International Exhibition The Laboratory of the Future

Additionally, the five-person jury could also award one special mention for National Participation and one or two special mentions to participants in The Laboratory of the Future. 

Lokko selected the members of the jury and, like her choice of Nwoko for the Lifetime Achievement Lion, had them approved by the Board of Directors of La Biennale di Venezia. The winners will be announced on Saturday, May 20, the public opening of the Biennale, which will then run until November 26, 2023. World-Architects will post a headline with the winners of the Golden Lions and other awards once they're announced.

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli (Italy) - president – is an Italian architect and curator based in Milan. He is the founder of 2050+, an interdisciplinary agency moving across technology, politics, design, and environmental practices. He curated Open, the Russian Pavilion at the 17^th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2021 and co-curated Manifesta’s 12^th edition in Palermo in 2018. Between 2007 and 2019 he has worked as architect and partner at OMA – Office for Metropolitan Architecture. He teaches at the Royal College of Arts in London Data Matter, a research and design studio exploring the entangled relationship between data and the material world. Latest projects include Synthetic Cultures at the 10^th Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam; the short film diptych Riders Not Heroes; the exhibitions Aquaria at MAAT in Lisbon and Penumbra in Venice; the design for the space of the Fredriksen’s collection at the National Museum of Norway in Oslo; and the transformation of La Rinascente’s modernist building icon in Rome.

Nora Akawi is a Palestinian architect and curator living in New York. She is an assistant professor of architecture at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and a co-founding partner in the interdisciplinary research and design studio interim. She co-curated the Pavilion of Bahrain at the 16^th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, titled Friday Sermon (2018). Her teaching and research focus on transcontinental South-South anti-colonial solidarity and on architecture’s role in erasure and bordering in settler colonialism, drawing from border studies, critical geography, and archive theory. Nora taught at Columbia University’s GSAPP, where she was the director of Studio-X Amman and initiated the Janet Abu-Lughod Library and Seminar. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Faktur: Documents and Architecture and InForma, the peer-reviewed architecture publication of the Universidad de Puerto Rico.

Thelma Golden (United States) is the Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, the world’s leading institution devoted to visual art by artists of African descent, where she began her career in 1987 before joining the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988. She returned to the Studio Museum in 2000 as Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs and was named Director and Chief Curator in 2005. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Barack Obama Foundation, Crystal Bridges Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She holds a B.A. in Art History and African American Studies from Smith College. She was appointed to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House by President Obama in 2010.

Tau Tavengwa (Zimbabwe) is the co-founder, curator and editor of Cityscapes, a hybrid annual publication that showcases different ideas and narratives on the built environment and cities globally from Africa, Latin America, and South Asia perspectives. He’s a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) (2018), an Aspen Global Leadership Fellow, a Research Fellow in Advanced Visualization at Max Planck Institute (2019-2023), and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics' LSE Cities from 2020-22. He is also the Curator-at-Large at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and was curator of the 2022 Lisbon Architecture Triennale’s Multiplicity exhibition. With Edgar Pieterse, he is a co-founder of the CS Collective.

Izabela Wieczorek (Poland) is a registered architect in Spain, and a researcher and educator based in London. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Reading, where she is the Director of the Master of Architecture Programme and the acting Research Lead for Architecture. She was a co-director of an award-winning Madrid-based office Gálvez+Wieczorek Arquitectura (2003-2016). Her work has been presented in several publications, including ‘Cartographies of the Imagination’, London (2021), ‘Works+Words Biennale of Artistic Research in Architecture’, KADK, Copenhagen (2019), and the Spanish Pavilion at the 16^th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia Exhibition (2018). She curated the In-Between public lecture series at Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Denmark (2013-2016).