Holesum was formed out of the Yale School of Architecture by consistent collaborators Azza Abou-Alam, Dimitri Brand, and James Coleman. They have experience in both residential and institutional design as well as various forms of architectural research
Azza Aboualam: MArch Yale 2018. Born in Egypt.
Professor at Zayed University in Dubai. Scholarly interests include the intersection of memory, architecture and society in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region. Her work with the UAE’s Ministry of Culture’s Architecture Initiative was published in the book titled In Search of Spaces of Coexistence: An Architect’s Journey (Ministry of Culture and Knowledge Development, 2019). Azza also contributed as a researcher in Building Sharjah, co-edited by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi and Todd Reisz (Birkhauser, 2021), and Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai, written by Todd Reisz (Stanford University Press, 2020). Additionally Azza has been published in AA Files 78, the New York Review of Architecture, Paprika!, among other publications.
Dimitri Brand: MArch Yale 2018. MPhil Cambridge 2021. Born in New England.
Dimitri is an architectural designer, fabricator, writer, and researcher. He holds a bachelor’s in Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a master’s from Yale University. He was recently a Bass Fellow at the University of Cambridge where he researched the relationship between architecture and the environment in early Science Fiction literature. Dimitri previously worked at KieranTimberlake in Philadelphia and OPAL in Belfast ME. Previous to architecture he worked as a carpenter and fabricator for five years and is currently building his own house.
James D Coleman: MArch Yale 2018. Born in upstate NY.
James is an architectural designer, artist, writer, and educator. He holds three degrees in architecture including a bachelor’s from the University at Buffalo and a master’s from Yale University. Coleman has worked professionally in art fabrication for the studio of Sarah Oppenheimer, and in architectural design and research for Eisenman Architects and Carlton Architecture. He is a Professor of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology Hillier College of Architecture and Design and Pratt Institute School of Architecture