Tabassum graduated from BUET in 1995, co-founded URBANA with Kashef Chowdhury in 1995, and won the competition for the Independence Monument and Liberation War Museum at Dhaka two years later; the pair carried that project for sixteen years. Since setting up her own studio in 2005 she has worked almost entirely with handmade brick, daylight and the flood-prone delta ground of Bangladesh. She has won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture twice — in 2016 for the Bait Ur Rouf Mosque, commissioned by her grandmother, and in 2025 for Khudi Bari, a demountable bamboo house for families displaced by river erosion. Time listed her among its hundred most influential people in 2024. She is one of very few women to have designed a mosque anywhere in South Asia.
