Huma Gupta

Assistant Professor

Huma Gupta is Assistant Professor of Architecture at MIT, affiliated with the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA), the History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture + Art group (HTC), and the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU). Her research traces how inequality becomes embedded in the built environment and develops methods to challenge it.

Dr. Gupta holds a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture and a Master's in City Planning from MIT. She previously held prestigious fellowships at Brandeis University, New York University-Abu Dhabi, and the Social Science Research Council.

Core Research

Dr. Gupta's scholarship centers on a single question: how do architectural and economic systems naturalize hierarchies, and how can we undo them? She examines this across three domains – urban housing, development economics, and ecological management – using critical historiography to reveal the choices that created inequality and imagine alternatives.

Her first book project, The Architecture of Dispossession, demonstrates how twentieth-century Iraq used architectural destruction and transformation of migrant reed and earth dwellings as a state-building tool. Her second book project, Dwelling and the Wealth of Nations, is an intellectual history that traces how economists from Iraq, India, the US, and the UK used reductive calculations to justify devaluing rural housing. Together, these works show that hierarchies are not inevitable but designed – and therefore can be redesigned.

Teaching & Scholarship

Dr. Gupta teaches courses on Archive Fever, Dwelling & Building in the Global South, Environmental Histories of Architecture, and Decolonial Ecologies. She has also taught a filmmaking workshop called 'Climate Futures, Cities Past.' Her scholarship has been published by the Journal of Architectural Education, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, MIT Press, AA Files, GTA Papers, and Yale University Press.

Practice

Rather than stopping at historical critique, Dr. Gupta moves towards intervention. She develops innovative archival methodologies to center excluded histories, documentary filmmaking to challenge dehumanizing representations of 'unproductive' ecologies and their stewards, and policy advocacy to advance land rights and housing security. These methods are integrated: her archival work feeds her teaching, which informs her practice, which shapes her scholarship.

She has worked on infrastructure in Afghanistan, municipal planning in Syria, housing in Boston, and humanitarian housing responses globally. Currently, she is producing She Was Not Alone, directed by Hussein al-Asadi, about a nomadic woman fighting to preserve her animals and way of life in Iraq's ancient marshes, which sit atop some of the largest oil fields in the world. This forthcoming film has won awards and grants from the Venice Film Festival (Final Cut), International Documentary Film Festival - Amsterdam, Doha Film Institute, Red Sea Film Institute, and El Gouna Film Festival, and was a finalist for the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund (premiering 2026).

Projects

Venice Biennale 2025 | UAE National Pavillion

"Growing Papayas in the Desert" | An agricultural engineer recounts one of his early greenhouse commissions in the 1980s U.A.E. for Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum. He was asked to design a custom greenhouse to grow papaya trees that can grow twenty feet in length. At a time when standard greenhouse assembly kits and their constituent parts were imported into the UAE by Dutch, Italian, and US companies, this commission demanded customization and improvisation of the standard height of the greenhouse. Additionally, it demanded the installation of gas heating to keep the trees warm when temperatures plunged at night. Although the dominant narrative of greenhouse construction during the 1970s-1990s in the UAE focuses on the production of cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce and sometimes cauliflower, peppers, kousa, and eggplant, the story of the papaya trees opens up other avenues of exploration that are not readily apparent in the textual and photographic archival record of this period. By combining oral history, existing literature, along with personal and institutional archival photographs, this article offers more textured insights into a transnational history of greenhouse production in the UAE that has traditionally focused on North American and European companies and expertise. Moreover, it shifts the focus from prefabricated greenhouse designs and plans to the messy and innovative aspects of implementation undertaken by laborers, engineers, and patrons on site who alternatively defied and complied with the intentions of the original design.

AA Files 2025 | The Library of Missing Metadata

Machine Learning visual datasets are composed of billions of image-text associations. The relationship between the text label and the image or between the text prompt and the generated image poses a challenge to historians to theorize and produce critical methodologies of reading this new corpus of visual culture. This article asks, what can critical approaches to the digital historiography of AI datasets learn from archival work and theory? Metadata can be traced back to the structures of library card catalogs and the development of informal methods of preservation and later formalized ‘scientific’ approaches to organizing archives and libraries. But the image-text relationship can also bring us to one of the earliest moments in the development of writing and archiving economic and property records through early pictographic forms of cuneiform script in the city of Uruk in southern Iraq. Zainab Bahrani, in her 2003 book The Graven Image, has theorized that these systems of writing cannot be understood as Jacques Derrida has previously argued through “traditional binarisms of the sign, upheld by Western metaphysics,” but rather an integrated reading of the text-image relationship is required. Building on this reading, the problem of missing visual data not only results in underrepresentation, misrepresentation, or intentional erasure of entire cultures as demonstrated by the artist Mimi Onouha and critical data scientist Catherine D’Ignazio, but also calls into question the role of the visual humanities in responding to the colonial genealogies of AI’s visual archives and its impact on machine learning. For example, as a historian engaged in a longstanding project of writing ‘history from below,’ I have tried to forge creative methodologies that challenge, broaden, and read visual archives to center rural migrants in the historiography of modern Iraq. Therefore, through a careful analysis of Rifat and Kamil Chadirji’s photographic collections of Iraq’s 20th century architecture and urban landscapes, this article proposes critical methodologies of tracing the many displacements and distortions of digital photographic artifacts as they travel across different modes of reception, collection, and annotation, eventually transforming into digitally compressed bits of data that are assembled and reassembled into the expansive probabilistic matrix of generative AI that splits image from its con-text. In doing so, this article seeks to reorient the conversation of generative AI from a focus on missing data to a reparative project of building a ‘library of missing metadata’ that enables different modes of interpretive ownership over these digital visual artifacts.

JAE 2024 | 'May our Egos Die so that the World May Live': Film, Climate, Pedagogy

Huma Gupta's image-based essay reflects upon her experience of running an experimental filmmaking workshop titled Climate Futures, Cities Past in the spring of 2023 at MIT’s School of Architecture featuring stills from four student films set in Greece, Italy, Pakistan, and Syria. It explores how architectural pedagogy can intersect with filmmaking to offer a critical space outside the studio or seminar paper. Engaging eco-critical and narrative approaches of Stefanie K. Dunning, Jennifer Fay, Ursula K. Le Guin, Donna Harraway, Saidiya Hartman, Adrian J. Ivakhiv, and Ousmane Sembène, it explores how ‘cinema might teach us to die’ or rather, embrace a different eschatological paradigm that moves beyond individual authorship, accomplishment, and post-mortem legacy towards more mutualist, collectivist, and anarchic models of existence. It argues that filmmaking as inquiry can offer a way to collect different kinds of stories that help facilitate the messy, uncomfortable, and wildly creative processes of unworlding and reworlding.

MIT 2024 | Visual Artists, Technological Shock, and Generative AI (Gupta, Jones, Ritchie)

Huma Gupta, Caroline A. Jones, and Matthew Ritchie write that the impact of generative AI (GenAI) programs on visual art is comparable to earlier historical moments of technological shock, when literary and visual artists grappled with unprecedented reproductive tools such as the printing press, photography, and cinema. Metabolizing the shock of those once radical inventions eventually yielded great bursts of artistic innovation. Yet, unlike those prior revolutions, the current one presents a deeper threat to artistic innovation by smoothing its source material into endless variants of seamless pastiche. By definition, the corpus of imagery currently being scraped for training already exists—it is overwhelmingly photographic, representational, and Western-hemispheric. As a result, algorithmic aesthetics visually echo the hundred-year-old art movement of Surrealism at its most banal. GenAI thus jeopardizes a singular function of visual artists in contemporary culture: to continuously innovate never-before-seen forms, artistic movements, styles, cognitive concepts, and theories of representation. Moreover, GenAI is a cultural technology. Since generative programs make secondary and tertiary materials by inputting their own outputs, they both intensify the bias found in the corpus and bury ever deeper the historical sources of that bias, neglecting significant future markets and constituencies who could be welcomed in to build richer archives with better metadata. We argue that more inclusive and transparent training sets, permeable models, and significant investment in what we call “public intelligence” can better shape the potential of GenAI tools, confronting technological shock in ways more likely to encourage rather than dampen artistic innovation for the public good.

Yale 2023 | Book Chapter in The Environment and Ecology in Islamic Art & Culture

Huma Gupta publishes a chapter titled "Visualizing the Marshes in Mayzara: A Material History of Urban Wetlands in Baghdad" in a new book published by Yale University Press. The Islamic world finds itself increasingly at the epicenter of our escalating climate emergency, both as a locus of the petrochemical industry and as home to extraordinary landscapes in which the effects of environmental transformation are acutely felt. Yet, far from a solely twenty-first-century concern, engagement with changing, and often extreme, natural conditions has long characterized Islamic art and architecture in the central Islamic lands and beyond into the Muslim diaspora. This new book brings together a diverse group of scholars and critics whose contributions address this profound ecological awareness through the dual lenses of Islamic culture and climate change.

Exhibition 2023 | Iraq: Beyond the Two Rivers

Iraq: Beyond the Two Rivers (Oct 6-Nov 3 @ MIT Keller Gallery) is a transhistorical meditation on architectural ambition, great migrations, urban design, climate change, and the radical promise of other ways of dwelling and building in today’s world. This exhibition is inspired by Dr. Huma Gupta’s fifteen years of architectural research on Iraq for her forthcoming book The Architecture of Dispossession. It puts artworks by renowned contemporary Iraqi artists in conversation with works Gupta commissioned and produced with a team of MIT students. The exhibition takes viewers on a multimedia journey through a video art piece by Sama Alshaibi set in Iraq’s marshes, an animation by Sadik Kwaish Alfraji set in Baghdad’s migrant neighborhoods, film stills from Hussein al-Asadi’s forthcoming documentary, a photograph by Mohanad al-Sudany focused on indigenous buffalo-breeding communities, an architectural model composed of reeds, earth, and cement by Bella Carmelita Carriker, and a large mixed media mural with archival video by Huma Gupta, Hajar Alrifai, and Mahwish Khalil.

2023 | Climate Futures, Cities Past Film Premiere

Prof. Gupta designed and taught a workshop where architecture students developed, shot, and edited 6 original short films set in Nasib, Syria, Caggiano, Italy, Tameslouht, Morocco, Drama, Greece, Lahore, Pakistan, and Kajaran, Armenia. Each film narrates climate stories from landscapes + places that have been deemed marginal, specifically showing how water scarcity, mining of copper, extraction of marble, urbanization of riverscapes, and shifting relations to the land across generations are experienced and addressed by resilient communities of miners, olive farmers, factory workers, shepherds, bedouin goat herders, boatmen, and potters. The student-directors were Hajar alRifai ("Dear Granddaughter: Tales of Drought from Syria"), Maria Gabriela Carucci ("On the Edge of Land"), Yasmine El Alaoui ("Tameslouht: Liminal Greys"), Laura-India Garinois ("Unearthed: The Domestication of Marble"), Mahwish Khalil ("Ravi: Tales from a River"), and Sarine Vosgueritchian ("Looking for Pirdoudan: Future Archives of an Armenian Mining Town"). The films were produced by Huma Gupta with executive producers Meitha alMazrooei and Mahwish Khalil, along with editing consultant Allyson Sherlock.

She Was Not Alone (documentary film)

Prof. Gupta is currently producing a documentary film titled 'She Was Not Alone' about Fatima, a nomadic woman who lives alone with her beloved buffaloes in the quickly disappearing Iraqi marshes. This film, directed by Hussein al-Asadi, is the first major cinematic work that centers the narrative voice and perspective of a woman in the marshes. Fatima lives in one corner of a vast inland delta system, collectively known as al-Ahwar. This wetland ecosystem consists of three interlinked lakes, the Central Marshes, the Iran-Iraq transboundary Hawizeh, and the Hammar marshes. In 2016, these wetlands and the neighboring Sumerian cities of Ur, Eridu, and Uruk became a World Heritage Site. However, we see signs of unbridled extraction, pollution, and politically motivated infrastructure collapse all around Fatima. Moreover, even as tens of thousands have migrated away from the region due to prolonged drought just in the past six months, Fatima’s struggle to stay demonstrates that each potential migrant is not just another ‘climate refugee’ whose complex inner and outer lives can be reduced to a mere statistic. Fatima is neither passive, nor a stereotype. Fatima’s story of self-determination in the midst of ecological collapse thus, offers an indigenous perspective. It shows how people who have been subjects of empire, occupation, or internal subjugation autonomously move forward despite the limitations these political systems seek to impose.

Publications

Huma Gupta

The Library of Missing Metadata: A Case for Thick Descriptions in AI Training Sets

AA Files 81

2025

Huma Gupta

"Growing Papayas in the Desert: An Indian Agricultural Engineer Recounts the Transnational History of Greenhouses in the UAE, 1970s-1990s" in Pressure Cooker: An Architectural Cookbook

UAE National Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale

2025

Huma Gupta

‘May Our Egos Die So That the World May Live’: Film, Climate, Pedagogy

Journal of Architectural Education