Sumayyah Súnmádé Raji

Sumayyah Súnmádé Raji is an Architectural Designer passionate about craft, traditional forms of space-making, storytelling, and participatory practice. Before BBB, she worked at MOE+ Art and Architecture in her hometown of Lagos while conducting her ongoing research on material landscapes in Nigeria. This research informed her thesis, "The (In)visible Colony," an organic housing project that reimagines repatriation as a communal act and reclaims the Nigerian cultural landscape still marred by colonialism. Sumayyah was recently selected as one of the fifty participants in La Biennale di Venezia’s inaugural Biennale College Architettura 2023 to explore and reimagine the themes of “Decolonization and Decarbonization” in architecture practice and education. She was also a Global Urban Ecology Fellow at the Sweet Water Foundation, working at the intersection of agriculture, architecture, and community education. Sumayyah graduated from Harvard GSD with a Master of Architecture in 2023 and has a Bachelor of Science in Architecture and Environmental Design from Morgan State University. At Harvard, she was co-president of AfricaGSD and started a series of conversations and workshops and an exhibition titled “Stories We Should Tell," which centered the work of African creatives on the continent and across the diaspora in design discourse. She has worked as a Materials Intern at the Harvard Art Museums, leading academic and public art workshops, and has researched edible materials used in art, conservation, and traditional building materials. She joined BBB in 2023.