Zahra Ebrahim's Bio

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Bio:

Born in Kenya, raised along the shores of British Columbia, and educated at McGill University in Montreal, Zahra Ebrahim has been an actively engaged in social change from a young age. Central to bridging her philosophy of building and design has been that architecture, at its best, must mirror the values of dynamism, pluralism and ingenuity. She strongly believes that we are now beginning to understand the need for reassessment of the built environment with the most successful projects - from airport terminals to relief shelters half a world over - being measured by their active response, on both levels of aesthetics and ingenuity, to their environments at large. It is her greatest hope to use design to cross social, economic and demographic boundaries. At the age of 22, Zahra started archiTEXT, a global interdisciplinary think tank dedicated to bringing young people together to use design as an agent of change. Their current project, a global contemporary art exhibit, book, and film – Adaptive Greening – explores the idea of architecture as not just an art, but a critical global issue, accounting for over 40% of our emissions. The challenge is to create a vernacular that can include the masses in a discussion that has traditionally been elitist and out of reach, and to bring architecture into the lexicon of a ten year old child to a stay-at-home mom to an executive at a major corporation. The film has currently been recognized with an award from the United Nations Environmental Program and NUFF Global International. Her work spans the profit and not-for-profit sector, also founding the Adaptive Greening Institute, a co-founder of the Twelve03 collaborative, and Director of the Canadian chapter of Young Women Social Entrepreneurs. Zahra was recently nominated as one of the Top 100 Young Global Social Entrepreneurs.