People like Lesley Lokko

Lesley Naa Norle Lokko is a Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist. From 2019 to 2020 she was a professor and served as Dean of Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture City College of New York, in addition to juggling teaching positions and different careers in Johannesburg, London, Accra and Edinburgh.

In 2015, Lokko established the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) at University of Johannesburg – an African school dedicated to postgraduate architecture education. She returned to Accra, Ghana in 2021 and established the African Futures Institute, a postgraduate school of architecture and public events platform.

Lesley Lokko was born in Dundee, the daughter of a Ghanaian surgeon and a Scottish mother, and grew up in Ghana and Scotland. At the age of 17 she went to a private boarding school in England. She began studying Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford University, but left the programme to go to the United States. She graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, with a BSc(Arch) in 1992, and a MArch in 1995, and went on to earn a PhD in architecture from the University of London in 2007.