The Diane Lewis Student Lecture Series | Thomas Aquilina and Abiba Coulibaly: From Pedagogy to Practice — New Archives for the City

Thursday, March 5, 2026, 6:30 - 8:30pm

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SLS Coulibaly

This event will be screened in Room 315F and through Zoom. 

For in-person attendance, please register in advance here
For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.

Thomas Aquilina is an architect and academic dedicated to building communities of radical imagination and collective practice. He is an Associate Professor and co-director of Spatial Justice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His current research draws on diasporic spatial experiences in both global and local contexts from downtown Kingston in Jamaica to North Kensington in London.

Abiba Coulibaly is a film curator with a background in critical geography. Her work focuses on democratising access to cinema as both a space and medium, exploring how moving image intersects with and furthers claims for civic and spatial equity. She is the founder of Brixton Community Cinema and Atlas Cinema, Associate Programmer at Open City Documentary Festival and previously held the position of Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art's School of Architecture.

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Asialy Bracey Gardella.

The Diane Lewis Student Lecture Series is endowed by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Located at 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.