Principal of Counterspace, an award-winning architecture and research studio, based between Johannesburg and London, Sumayya Vally’s design, research and pedagogical practice is searching for expression for hybrid identities and territory, particularly for African and Islamic conditions. Her design process is often forensic, and draws on the aural, performance, the supernatural, and the overlooked as generative places of history and work.

A TIME100 Next List honouree, named as a figure who will shape the future of architectural canon and practice; and designer of the 20th Serpentine Pavilion (2020/2021), Vally is the youngest architect ever to be commissioned for the internationally renowned architecture programme, which opened to unprecedented critical acclaim in 2021. She has recently worked on initiating and developing Support Structures for Support Structures, a new fellowship programme launched at the Serpentine, which supports artists and collectives who support community through their work at the intersections of art and social justice, art and the archive and art and ecology. Sumayya has also recently been named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and serves on several boards through her interest in dynamic forms of archive and supporting new networks of knowledge in the arts. She is presently immersed in several projects which work to create cultural typologies and platforms for the future, through the lenses of identity and embodied heritage - including work on the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Library in Liberia and through her role as creative director and contemporary commissions curator for the first-ever Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah.