Sumaya Dabbagh

Sumaya Dabbagh was born in Jeddah, studied architecture at Bath under the supervision of Peter Smithson and Ted Happold, and began her career in London and Paris in the early 1990s before settling in the Gulf. In 2008 she founded Dabbagh Architects in Dubai, among the first architectural practices in the Emirates led by a woman and among the first RIBA-chartered practices in the region. Her buildings are quiet, low and heavily shaded, working with concrete and desert-coloured stone against strong light: the Mleiha Archaeological Centre in Sharjah, wrapped around a Bronze Age tomb, and the Mosque of the Late Mohamed Abdulkhaliq Gargash in Dubai, one of the first mosques in the UAE designed by a woman.