Sekou Cooke is an architect, researcher, educator, and curator born in Jamaica and based in Charlotte, NC. He is the newly appointed Director of the Master of Urban Design program at UNC Charlotte and a recipient of the 2021/2022 Nasir Jones HipHop Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Within his professional practice, sekou cooke STUDIO, he brings thoughtful processes and rigorous experimentation to a vast array of project types from public, non-profit, and residential works in New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, to mixed-use projects and tenant improvements in California, to speculative developments locally and internationally.

Sekou’s current research centers on the emergent field of Hip-Hop Architecture, a theoretical movement reflecting the core tenets of hip-hop culture with the power to create meaningful impact on the built environment and give voice to the marginalized and underrepresented within design practice. In this lecture, he will discuss his new book, Hip-Hop Architecture, his participation in the MoMA exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, and other current work testing hip-hop architectural principles and redefining Blackness in architecture.