Faculty

Profile

Hala Abdel Malak is a transdisciplinary researcher, educator, and cultural practitioner whose work explores the transmission of knowledge across materials, spaces, ancestral traditions, and organisational life.

Her practice moves between artistic and systemic inquiries: the Kafiye Project explores the keffiyeh as a woven archive of resistance and belonging; Maljaa engages Beirut’s bomb shelters as architectures of memory and imagination; and Beyond Borders convenes artists, scholars, and communities across geographies to reimagine territory as a meeting place. In dialogue with Indigenous communities on Turtle Island and in Gabon, through reconciliation practices, women’s ceremonies, oral rites, and ritual, she engages ancestral traditions as living forms of transmission and cultural resilience. She is also an apprentice Nima, studying within the Fang Bwitist tradition in Gabon, and a student of the Gong, deepening her engagement with sound practice.

At Parsons School of Design, where she has taught for over a decade, she develops pedagogies that bring artistic, multicultural, and critical epistemologies into dialogue. As former Director of both the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design and the BBA in Strategic Design and Management, her leadership style embodies her rooted research and practice. She previously also co-founded Design and Flow, a strategic and curatorial platform. Hala is also completing doctoral studies at Tavistock & Portman in Consulting and Leading in Organisations: Psychodynamic and Systemic Approaches, extending this work into the organisational realm and opening ways to read the unconscious life of systems and the conditions under which transformation becomes possible.

At the core of her practice lies a guiding question: how might we establish new ways of relating between humans, and with the living world, that are not bound by colonial narratives of dominance, but instead grounded in reciprocity, plurality, and respect? Central to this is her inquiry into how systems, stories, and spaces can be attuned to enable continuity, renewal, and resilience across boundaries.

Her work has been featured in Print Magazine, Metropolis, Design Indaba, MoMA, Beirut Design Week, NY Design Week, Beirut Art Center, and AIGA, and was awarded SXSW’s Learn by Design for her work with refugee education. She holds graduate degrees in business management from HEC and an MFA in Design Criticism from the School of Visual Arts. Hala also serves on the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Academic Advisory Council for 2025-2027.