Irene Brisson

Degrees

• Doctorate of Architecture, University of Michigan
• Master of Architecture, Columbia University
• Bachelor of Science in Art and Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Biography

Irene Brisson is a built environment scholar whose research, teaching and practice center historically marginalized building cultures and designers in Haiti and the African diaspora within a radically expanded field of global architectural history. They are completing a book, Kreyòl Architecture: Designing Haitian Dwellings, based on their extended ethnographic research with architects, bòsmason, non-governmental organizations and residents engaged in housebuilding in Leyogàn, Haiti.

Their new research project, Building Cultures: Making Homeplace in Diaspora, documents diasporic enclaves in North America including long-standing urban destinations like New York, Miami, Montreal and Boston as well as emerging suburban and rural destinations. It explores the intimate construction of domestic environments in the Haitian diaspora through the frame of lakay, or homeplace, as a discursive and conditional index of belonging based in the relationships between people, place and memory. Dr. Brisson also co-directs the Caribbean Spatial Justice Lab, which works to support a network of transdisciplinary and transnational design researchers committed to addressing escalating inequality and climate vulnerability in the greater Caribbean region and its diasporas.

Dr. Brisson’s research has been supported by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the United States Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Program, the Institute for the Humanities and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, and a Carter Manny Dissertation Writing Award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Irene co-edited Ground Rules for Humanitarian Design (2015) and has published in MIT’s Thresholds and the CCA’s Of Migration series. In 2023-24 they were a Getty/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History. Previously, they have taught at Louisiana State University, Bowling Green State University and Parsons the New School for Design.