Khaled Malas

Khaled Malas is an architect and art historian. His research focuses on images and image-making technologies that produce and challenge the potential of places, real and imagined. He is currently working on a book, tentatively titled The Kaaba in a Bowl: For All Ailments and Afflictions, which examines a corpus of medieval copper-alloy bowls bearing representations of the Kaaba. The book considers how architectural images could operate as technologies of healing, protection, and access to sacred power.

He is also the principal and co-founder of Sigil, an art/design collective based in Beirut and New York City that explores the metamorphoses of Arab landscapes marked by historical and contemporary struggles. Sigil’s ongoing project birdsong (2019–) explores the poetic entanglements between birds and other bodies present in the Syrian landscape, in collaboration with comrades in the occupied Jawlan (Golan Heights).

Khaled teaches at Pratt Institute, NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and the Cooper Union School of Architecture. His writing includes “Concerning the Observation of Other Corpses” (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2021) and his creative practice has been the subject of the interview “What We Opt to Do” (Art Papers, 2022).

He received his PhD in Islamic Art and Architectural History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2026, and holds a Post-Professional Master’s Degree in Architecture from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Engineering in Architecture from the American University of Beirut.