Our Built World

Fiyel Levent is a Tatar American architect, designer, and writer with a bachelor's degree in architecture and a master's in creative writing. As the director of interior design at a woman-owned architecture firm in New York, she's worked on numerous historically significant and complex civic buildings in New York City. With architectural grants from the Center for Architecture and the Architectural League of New York, she's done research around the world, including a trip to Andalucía, Spain, to explore the ancient architecture of the Moors, as well as a Silk Road expedition that took her from Turkey through China and was the inspiration for her TEDx talk. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children. Zainab "Daby" Faidhi is an Iraqi conceptual artist, illustrator, and architect with a bachelor's degree in architecture and a master's in character animation design. She's worked on several short film projects that have won international awards, as well as the feature film The Breadwinner, helping to design backgrounds, sets, props, and concept art. A winner of the Student Academy Award, she currently lives in Los Angeles.