Effective July 1, 2026, the MIT School of Architecture and Planning recognized four faculty members in the Department of Architecture with promotions for their significant contributions to the school.
“These individuals offer the MIT community creativity, knowledge, and scholarship that is exhilarating,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “Collectively, they add considerable strength to our faculty and research capacity.”
Xavi Aguirre has been promoted to associate professor without tenure. As the director of DIS-ASSEMBLIES LAB here at MIT, his work focuses on learning from and designing for when architectures come apart, while also considering our relationship to material and commodity circulations. Aguirre is also the founder/director of the design studio stock-a-studio, and his work has been commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Industry Opera Co., and MOCA Geffen, among others.
Rosalyne Shieh has been promoted to associate professor without tenure. Shieh is an architect based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Kaohsiung, Taiwan, whose work sits at the intersection of material culture, oral history, and postcolonial identity. She previously worked at Stan Allen Architect, ARO, and Abalos & Herreros, and was co-director of Schaum/Shieh. She is a co-author of Blanking: An Annotated Archive of Projects and Thoughts on Architecture (Park Books, 2025).
Nida Sinnokrot has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Sinnokrot is an artist and educator whose work across film, video, photography, sculpture, installation, and agriculture explores how various forms of power and bias are embedded in dominant narrative structures and attendant articulations of time and space. He is a co-founder of Sakiya, an international residency program and research platform in the West Bank village of Ein Qinya. Recent solo shows include Nida Sinnokrot at Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne (2019-20) and “Expand Extract Repent Repeat” at Carlier | Gebauer in Berlin (2018-19).
Kristel Smentek has been promoted to full professor. Smentek is a historian of 18th-century European art, specializing in the graphic and decorative arts, the history of collecting, and European encounters with Asia. She's received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was also co-curator of Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (Harvard Art Museum 2022).
Learn more about all faculty promotions across MIT SA+P during 2026: https://news.mit.edu/2026/faculty-receive-promotions-school-architecture-and-planning-0903
