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

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

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

Journal of Architectural Education

2024

Huma Gupta

The Library of Missing Metadata

AA Files 81

2025

Huma Gupta, Caroline A. Jones, and Matthew Ritchie

Visual Artists, Technological Shock, and Generative AI

An MIT Exploration of Generative AI