Bridget Peak

Bridget Peak is a SMArchS Candidate ('26) in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. She holds a BA from Wellesley College ('19). Before entering the AKPIA program, she worked as a researcher abroad, collaborating with Project Elea in Athens, the Kuenyehia Trust for Contemporary Art in Accra, and Art for Refuge in Jakarta to conduct independent research on artwork as a means of negotiating diasporic identities. Her work as an arts educator took form in Philadelphia, PA, where she was Programs Coordinator for Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, an Arab arts and culture nonprofit for two years. She is a Fulbright Research Award recipient, having published on curriculum development attentive to heritage with the Art Education Department of Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman in 2023. Most recently, she was an Advanced Arabic student on a Center for Arabic Study Abroad I Fellowship in Amman, Jordan.

Her research interests lie in the contemporary construction and transmittance of national heritage narratives through selective attention to facets of complex histories; she is focused on the Arabian Gulf and its interactions with the rest of the Indian Ocean littoral. She is a freelance writer, with published essays and literary reviews in Asymptote Journal and the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, as well as an aspiring translator.