About

Yasaman Esmaili

Founder and Principal

Yasaman Esmaili is an architect, educator, and researcher working between Boston, New York, and Tehran. She is the founder of Studio Chahar, a design and research practice she established as a platform for architecture, cultural work, climate resilience, and innovation grounded in local knowledge.

Her practice begins in the field, in conversation with users, in prototyping, in testing under real conditions, and arrives at work that is both buildable and transferable: from museums and exhibitions to public space and lightweight infrastructure in fragile settings.

She holds a B.Arch from the University of Tehran (ranked first, 2008), an M.Arch from the University of Arizona (2011), and an M.S. in Computational Design from the University of Washington (2015, full scholarship). Her professional experience includes roles at Blokable (project architect, prefabricated housing, Seattle, 2016–2018), Hewitt Architects, and Arcosanti, alongside earlier training in architecture offices in Tehran and Istanbul. She is co-founder of Color My Home, a series of architecture workshops with immigrant children rethinking the idea of “home,” and a founding member of the united4design collective.

Recent recognition includes the Ammodo Award (2025), the Digital Futures Professional Practice in Architectural Design Award (2024), the University of Washington Graduate of the Last Decade Award (2023), and the Tamayouz Excellence Award, Rising Star (2020). Her project work has been shortlisted for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and has received the ICOM Creativity Award, the LafargeHolcim Global Silver and Regional Gold Awards, the AIA National Award of Honor, the Architect Magazine R+D Award, and the AIA Seattle Award of Merit.

Yasaman’s work sits at the intersection of museum design and storytelling, from concept and scenario-writing to visitor-experience design and interactive prototyping. She has served since 2022 as an active member of ICAMT, the International Committee for Architecture and Museum Techniques (ICOM), and since 2025 as an elected board member of ICOM ArchiTechs, as the committee is now named. Her Hikma Community Complex has been on permanent display at MoMA since 2024; her work has also been shown at Tehran’s Niavaran Cultural Center, the 5th Chicago Architecture Biennial, Gallery 4 in New York, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Alongside practice, Yasaman has taught architecture at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston since 2021, and previously at Keene State College, Roger Williams University, and the University of Washington. She has been a visiting critic at Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Pratt Institute, and an invited speaker internationally, most recently the Tasmeem Biennial in Doha, Qatar.

Kimia Amini

Designer and Curator, Head of the Tehran Office

Kimia Amini is a designer and curator specializing in museum experience design, and Director of the Innovation Group at Iran’s National Museum of Science and Technology. Since 2019, working alongside Studio Chahar, she has focused on the social role of museums, bringing climate change, accessibility, and the participatory, creative presence of audiences into the museum design process.

Her practice spans content design and ideation, museology and scenario-writing, concept design for museums built around emerging technologies, and participatory design that carries an audience’s creative involvement from implementation through operation. She holds a B.A. in Museology and Archaeology from the University of Cultural Heritage and an M.A. in International Relations from Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, and has collaborated with the Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East (ISMEO) on a digital archaeology project.

Kimia’s project work sits at the intersection of design and technology, from smart display cases developed with the Virtual Reality Lab at K. N. Toosi University of Technology, to AI workshops for museums, to “The Voice of History,” a program reviving historical instruments performed inside the historic monuments of their own era, including Persepolis, Hafezieh, Chogha Zanbil, and Chehel Sotoun. She is also the ideator and producer behind original video-art and long-running online programming on science museums, and founder of Iran’s National Policy Council for Science, University, and Industrial Museums.

Internationally, she is an active member of ICOM and ICOM Iran, and has led capacity-building workshops across more than twenty countries, including as an official side event of COP26 in Glasgow. She has hosted international workshops for the Museum of Innocence with Orhan Pamuk, and has advised on the conversion of more than thirty historic houses into museums across Iran, from concept through execution.