Samia Henni was born and raised in Algiers, Algeria. She is a historian, a theorist, an educator, and an exhibition maker of the built, destroyed, and imagined environments. She is interested in questions of colonization, deserts, displacement, gender, extraction, and wars. In 2016, she received her Ph.D. (with distinction, ETH Medal) in the History and Theory of Architecture from the gta Institute, ETH Zurich. Since 2017, she is Lecturer at the gta Institute, ETH Zurich, and at the Geneva University of Art and Design.