Hana Meihan Davis

Hana is a designer and writer interested in the intersection of the built environment with protest, identity politics and collective memory. 

She believes that architecture and journalism are two sides of the same coin: Rooted in a passion for storytelling and a dedication to interrogating the problems of our world. Compelling writing builds from the attention to detail required by the visually oriented eyes of architects. On the flip side, the built environment is empowered (and can empower) when intertwined with a gripping narrative. Born in Hong Kong in the shadow of the 1997 handover and raised by a legion of the city’s pro-democracy activists, Hana's love for home underpins both faces of her creativity.

In June 2021, Global Dispatches published Hana's debut political memoir, 'For the Love of Hong Kong: A Memoir From My City Under Siege'. The book opens with the National Security Law, and weaves Hong Kong's decades-long fight against tyranny with Hana's childhood among the city's top political activists. She spent the summer of 2020 working on a series of COVID-19 memorials for the city of New Haven, CT — responding to the pandemic’s impact on this diverse city and its exacerbation of systemic inequalities. She has written and worked at The Washington Post, the South China Morning Post & the Yale Daily News. Hana graduated from Yale University in 2020 with a B.A. in Architecture Design. She was a Yale Journalism Scholar and a member of the Yale Law School's Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights.