Nina Cooke John

Nina Cooke John is an Adjunct Assistant Professor as Columbia GSAPP. Nina is the founding principal of Studio Cooke John Architecture and Design, a multidisciplinary design studio that values placemaking as a way to transform relationships between people and the built environment. Working at the scale of the human body; individually or collectively, in the home or on the street, responding to how we use space in our everyday lives, whether in the family unit or as a community. Studio Cooke John was recently selected to design the Flatiron Public Plaza Installation for 2020. The public art installation will be on view through January 1st 2021. Nina’s work has also been featured in Architectural Record, Madame Architect, on NBC’s Open House New York, in Dwell Magazine’s “13 Extraordinary Women in Design and Architecture You Need to Know,” and the Center for Architecture’s 2018 exhibition, Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture.

Nina began her professional career working on the designs of cultural institutions with Voorsanger and Associates and Polshek Partnership (now Ennead) before moving onto retail design, corporate offices, and custom residential construction. She is licensed to practice architecture in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Nina earned her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University and MSAAD from Columbia University. She has been a design educator for 20 years teaching at NYIT, Syracuse University, and currently at Parsons School of Design.