Professor Naomi Stead is Director of the Design and Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform at RMIT - a research leadership role in which she enables researchers to work in collaborative and interdisciplinary ways towards high-impact research with benefit to people and planet.

She was previously a Professor of Architecture at Monash University, Australia, where she was Head of Department from 2018-2020. She is a past President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand. Her research interests lie in architecture’s cultures of re/production, mediation, and reception. She is an award-winning architecture critic, having written more than seventy commissioned feature and review articles, and is presently a featured writer for the online journal Places, where she writes essays on concepts and mythologies within and without architecture. She is also the architecture critic for The Saturday Paper.

She has edited or co-edited six books, including Semi-detached: Writing, representation and criticism in architecture (Uro, 2012); with Janina Gosseye and Deborah van der Plaat, Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research (Princeton Architectural Press, 2019); with Hélène Frichot, is Writing Architectures: Fictocritical Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2020); and most recently with Tom Lee, Ewan McEoin, and Megan Patty, After The Australian Ugliness, National Gallery of Victoria and Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2021.

Naomi was the leader of the Australian Research Council (ARC) project ‘Equity and Diversity in the Australian Architecture Profession: Women, Work and Leadership,’ which led to the co-founding (with Justine Clark and others) of Parlour. Her current ARC project explores the work-related wellbeing of architects and architecture students, under the title ‘Architectural Work Cultures: professional identity, education and wellbeing.’ This is a collaboration with Maryam Gusheh, Julie Wolfram Cox, Kirsten Orr, Brian Cooper, Byron Kinnaird, and an army of fantastic research assistants.