Celebrating AANHPI Design and Leadership with Mimi Hoang of nARCHITECTS

To celebrate Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage month and its 2025 theme “A Legacy of Leadership and Resilience”, the AIANY Women in Architecture Committee is honored to feature Mimi Hoang, AIA, Co-Founding Partner, nARCHITECTS, as a keynote speaker. Hoang's presentation, Civic Natures, will discuss the work of nARCHITECTS through the lens of her personal motivations and path through professional and academic realms.

Following Hoang's presentation, Ming Thompson, AIA, Principal, Atelier Cho Thompson and Co-Founder, A Rising Tide, will moderate a fireside chat with Mimi Hoang. Both Hoang and Thompson are featured in A Rising Tide, an initiative to cultivate leadership and increase visibility of Asian and Pacific Islanders working in design for the built environment.

We will conclude with audience Q&A and networking. Please join us for this special event!

Speakers:
Mimi Hoang, AIA, Co-Founding Partner, nARCHITECTS
Ming Thompson, AIA, Principal, Atelier Cho Thompson; Co-Founder, A Rising Tide

About the Speakers:
Mimi Hoang co-founded nARCHITECTS with Eric Bunge with a belief in architecture as an agent of positive change that can connect people and environments in unexpected ways. An ambition to respond to changes in contemporary life while fostering social engagement guides her work. Born in the tropics of Vietnam and trained in Amsterdam and New York City, she brings a global outlook and an obsession with greenery to the firm’s design culture. Hoang teaches graduate design studios as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University and previously taught at Yale and Harvard Universities. She received her Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and her Bachelor of Science in Art and Design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Architectural Record recently recognized her with a Women in Architecture Design Leadership Award.

nARCHITECTS received the 2023 National Design Award in Architecture by the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Additional honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters in Architecture Award, AIA New York State Firm of the Year Award, and AIA National Institute Honor Award.

Ming Thompson is a co-founder of A Rising Tide, an initiative to cultivate leadership and increase visibility of Asian and Pacific Islanders working in design for the built environment. Thompson is principal of Atelier Cho Thompson, a New Haven and San Francisco-based multidisciplinary practice working between architecture, interiors, graphics, and strategy. ACT’s work frequently blurs the boundaries between typologies, as they draw inspiration from their work in schools, museums, offices, restaurants, and homes around the world. Thompson was a recipient of the AIA Young Architect Award in 2020, and her firm has been honored with the IIDA Foundation Visionary Award and the Architect’s Newspaper Young Architects Award. ACT’s work has been featured in Metropolis, Architect, Dezeen, and at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Educated at Yale and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Ming is a critic at the Yale School of Architecture, where she teaches courses focused on community-engaged design. Thompson grew up in Southwestern Virginia, where her boisterous Southern-Chinese family runs a barbeque restaurant in an old dairy barn.