Sekou Cooke is an architect, urban designer, researcher, and curator. Born in Jamaica and based in Charlotte, North Carolina, he is the former the Director of the Master of Urban Design program at UNC Charlotte, the 2021/2022 Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, and a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective.
Cooke’s research practice centers on the emergent field of Hip-Hop Architecture, a theoretical movement reflecting the core tenets of hip-hop culture with the power to create meaningful impact on the built environment and give voice to the marginalized and underrepresented within design practice.
This work has been explored through his writings, exhibitions, lectures, and symposia. It is the subject of his monograph Hip-Hop Architecture, published in April 2021, and the 2018 exhibition, Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, first mounted in 2018 at the AIA Center for Architecture in New York. This exhibition has travelled to several venues across the US. His work was also featured in the landmark exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, at the Museum of Modern Art.
Sekou holds a B. Arch from Cornell University, an M. Arch from Harvard University, and is licensed to practice architecture in New York and North Carolina.
