Aslıhan Demirtaş is the principal of Aslıhan Demirtaş Design and Research Studio and co-founder of KHORA, interdisciplinary design studios based in Istanbul and New York. Her practice purposefully crosses territories and boundaries of disciplines in the forms of building, landscape and installation projects, exhibitions, and art projects, as well as research and activism.

Demirtas was the lead designer for the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, and the Miho Chapel in Kyoto, Japan for I.M. Pei-Architect, among others. In 2009 she started her own practice in New York and established her Istanbul office in 2011 to oversee her projects in Turkey and Europe.

Aslihan Demirtas is full-time faculty at Kadir Has University, Faculty of Arts & Design, Istanbul. She has lectured at GSD, Harvard, MIT, The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Parsons and American University in Beirut among others.  She has authored a chapter in the book Landscapes of Development: The Impact of Modernization on the Physical Environment of the Eastern Mediterraneanpublished by Harvard University Press and is currently working on her book Graft funded by the Graham Foundation.

Nora Arapi Krasniqi – is an architect specialized in the field of conservation of monuments and sites. During her career she was engaged in several integrated conservation, design of conservation and management of conservation projects, as well as management plans for heritage sites. She has been working in cultural heritage field since 2009, where she started her career at the Swedish foundation Cultural Heritage without Borders (CHwB), later to continue at the Ministry of Culture of Kosovo, respectively Regional Centre for Cultural Heritage in Prizren. The passion for preservation of built heritage and the ambition to use this heritage as potential for sustainable urban development are two main components that motivate her work.

Ares Shporta is a cultural worker based in Prizren. After studying cultural policy at the Istanbul Bilgi University, in 2015 he became the director of the Lumbardhi Foundation, which was founded to continue the Initiative for the Protection of Lumbardhi Cinema. His work in the field of sustaining an active community of contributors to the initiative, coordinating the institutional and spatial re-thinking of the cinema and running the programs in its formative phase. Previously he has been a film producer and translator, while also working in different capacities in festivals, cultural networks and various civic platforms in Kosovo and its surrounding region. Shporta currently serves as the Chairman of Network of Cultural Organisations in Prizren and as the President of Kooperativa – Regional Platform for Culture.

Jeton Jagxhiu is a graphist, researcher and public relations professional from Prizren. Having completed his studies in the Zagreb Academy for Graphic Technology, he has worked in several graphic studios in Zagreb before he set up his own practice in design, marketing and printing services in Prizren. Jagxhiu was also involved in the development department of DokuFest, mainly in charge of campaigns, marketing and fundraising between 2004 and 2011. For the last 18 years he has written in various newspapers and magazines in Kosovo and after a long period of social activism he has become a political activist. In his personal capacity, Jagxhiu has conducted research across-disciplines about Prizren’s identity and history through its cuisine, river, maps, oral histories and various documents, some of which were shared with the public in the form of maps, brochures, short stories, lectures and a local food cookbook.

Sali Shoshi is an architect and environmentalist from Kosovo. He has been involved in the conservation of cultural heritage of Kosovo for 17 years as a member of the Kosovan Foundation “Cultural Heritage without Borders” – CHwB Kosova. Shoshi is involved in many initiatives and projects for the protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage in post-conflict and transition contexts.