Graham Foundation Grants Awarded to Bard Faculty Olga Touloumi and Farah Alkhoury

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Bard College is pleased to announce that the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts has awarded two 2025 Grants for Individuals to support projects by Olga Touloumi, associate professor of architectural history, and Farah Alkhoury, architecture fellow at Bard, jointly with Alkhoury’s collaborator Ameneh Solati, a research-based artist and architect. The Graham Foundation is considered one of the most significant grantmakers in the field of architecture, and its grants are awarded in recognition and support of significant contributions to the study of architecture, design, and related disciplines.

For Touloumi’s project, Building Worlds: A Feminist Counter-Biography of Modern Architecture, she will be conducting research on the stories and practices that emerge from the life and works of an unseen figure in architecture: the architect, teacher, and crocheter Christine Benglia-Bevington. Biographies often cast individual figures as exceptional geniuses who lead, create, and transform a field, yet everyday life in architectural offices, classrooms, and construction sites reveals a more complex ground reality. Building on recent efforts to write women into architectural history, Touloumi’s project employs biography to reconstruct Benglia-Bevington's perspective that offers a unique view into how women navigated the profession, reinvented what a practice looked like, and ultimately made and held space for feminist work on the built environment.

Alkhoury, together with her codirector Ameneh Solati, will examine the marshes of southern Iraq—which have long been subjected to environmental injustice and now face new threats from oil development—for their project Against the Denial of Wetland: Environmental Stewardship in the Hawizeh Marsh. Since January 2024, police have blocked access to the Hawizeh Marsh, one of the region’s three major wetlands, to enable construction of the Iraq-Iran Sihrab oil field, cutting the indigenous Ahwari people off from vital resources. The project investigates how spatial strategies framed as economic growth and nation-building manipulate ecological flows and accelerate the climate crisis, endangering Ahwari lifeways. Through spatial analysis and archival research, it interrogates narratives that erase Indigenous knowledge and aims to offer tools to support local resistance.

The 2025 grantees join a worldwide network of individuals and organizations that the Graham Foundation has supported over the past 69 years. In that time the Foundation has awarded more than 45 millions dollars in direct support.

Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. Projects funded in this 2025 Grant to Individuals cycle include exhibitions, films, publications, research, site-specific installations, and digital initiatives that contribute new interdisciplinary ideas on architecture and design to publics around the world. These projects are being led by 64 individuals that include established and emerging architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, historians, scholars, and writers. To learn more, visit: grahamfoundation.org/
  About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year, residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,200 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in more than 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 13 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 165-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
 

This event was last updated on 08-13-2025

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