Nashid Nabian

Nashid Nabian was born and raised in Tehran, Iran, and earned a Master's in Architectural Engineering at Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran. She pursued her post-graduate studies at the University of Toronto's Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, where she earned a Master of Urban Design degree, and received the Toronto Association of Young Architects award for her thesis on the enhancement of the Toronto Waterfront. She has a doctoral degree from Harvard Graduate School of Design, and has completed a 2-year post-doctoral fellowship at MIT SENSEable City Lab.

Nashid Nabian’s research focuses on the digital augmentation of architecture and constructed landscapes, particularly public spaces, and how novel technologies impact the spatial experience by soliciting the needs and desires of inhabitants or users. Her research and projects in the field of digital augmentation have been showcased in various venues, including the ACADIA, IEEE Digital Ecosystems Conference, the UCMedia Conference on User-Centric Media, the Mobile Multimedia Communications Conference, and Seed magazine.

She has taught classes on Responsive Environments, Smart Cities and Bottom-up Urbanism, all focused on deployment of situated technologies in built environments, at University of Toronto, MIT, North Eastern University, and Harvard Graduate School of Design. During her three-year long appointment at Harvard Graduate School of Design, she  supervised a multi-year research project on Smart Cities at GSD in collaboration with University of Bergamo.

From 2005 to 2012, she was partner at former Arsh Design Studio, a Tehran-based architecture office both nationally and internationally recognized for its projects.

In 2012, after dissolution of Arsh Studio, She co-founded [Shift] Process Practice with Rambod Eilkhani. She is the author of many seminal articles and book chapters in the field of architectural and urban technologies and is a frequent contributor to Iranian periodicals focused on Architecture and Urbanism.

In 2016, Nashid established Tehran Urban Innovation Center [TUIC] as the R&D proxy of [Shift] Process Practice. She has been directing TUIC since then.