Mohamed Elshahed: Storytelling Between Worlds
Throughout his multi-disciplinary, international career, Mohamed Elshahed has found that the most apt description of his work is storytelling. In this episode of Atelier, he guides us through Cairo, London, Mexico City, and Paris, intertwining histories and personal anecdotes to provide context for the book project he’s currently undertaking as an Institute Fellow.
Atelier is produced by the Columbia Global Paris Center, a Columbia University initiative housed at Reid Hall.
Mohamed Elshahed is a writer, curator, and critic of architecture. He is the author of Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide (AUC Press, 2020) and was the curator of Cairo Modern at New York’s Center for Architecture (October 2021–March 2022). He earned a Masters from MIT’s Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and a PhD from NYU’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies. He is the curator of the British Museum’s Modern Egypt Project and of Modernist Indignation, Egypt’s winning pavilion at the 2018 London Design Biennale. In 2019 Apollo Magazine named him among the 40 influential thinkers and artists in the Middle East. In 2011 he founded Cairobserver, a fluid project with six printed magazines distributed for free to stimulate public debates around issues of architecture, heritage, and urbanism. Mohamed is based in Mexico City.
