JULIET M. KAVISHE

ABOUT

Juliet holds an M (Prof) in Interior Architecture and is a practicing Professional Interior Architect, Design Educator, and alumna of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Over the course of a career spanning 16 years and two continents (America and Africa), she has worked as an Interior Architect and Architectural Designer on projects with a focus on residential homes and commercial and corporate workspaces globally. Juliet is an Executive Board Member of the PADI (Pan Afrikan Design Institute) which they are striving to create a Design community specifically for Design professionals and academics with a focus on African Design and African-focused Design education. Juliet was also appointed as one of the Directors of the IID (African Institute of the Interior Design Profession), where she strives to improve and promote excellence and professionalism in the Interior Design profession, through hosting and leading dialogues and lectures around improving the resources and working relationships of the registered IID members and getting involved in the Black Interior Design Forum (IID/BID) that was created to establish a specific platform for black interior designers. Her education was further bolstered by a traineeship focusing on bridging the gap between spatial design and curatorship of artworks at New York’s Guggenheim Museum where she worked closely with Architects and Curators to ensure the vision of both disciplines was met.

 

Juliet’s passion for education has afforded her the privilege to invigilate and moderate design exams from undergraduate to postgraduate level at various design institutions in South Africa for the past decade.

She was a Lecturer in first-year Design, Visual Communication, and Tectonics, a Lecturer in third-year Professional Practice, and is currently the Postgraduate Program lead in the Interior Design Department where she has formulated research topics, design ethos, and methodologies in addition to being a Design Lecturer and Supervisor, guiding the honors students through their design projects as it relates to their thesis for the year. 

 

Juliet has also written and contributed to publications in conference proceedings and books and has a solid publication record in internationally indexed academic journals and publications.  Her passion for the promotion of the Design profession, particularly within a broader African context has led to various opportunities to share her expertise in Interior Architecture, including a lecture in 2013 on sustainable design and traditional African building practices at the World Policy Institute in New York, USA, a lecture on a Reimagined African Writing System at the 2022 DECOREX Summit, and call-up as Juror for the Caesarstone Student Design competition in 2019, 2021 & 2022. She went on to compose the Caesarstone Student Design competition brief for 2020/21, which was one of the most successful briefs dealing exclusively with Adaptive Re-Use of sites and buildings.

 

Juliet is a self-proclaimed Afro-minimalist and brought her personal ethos as an ambassador for the IID in 2018 and contributed to the PADI panel discussions around the identity of "Afrikan Design" in February 2020. 

 

In October 2022 Juliet was elected as one of the new Vice Presidents of the ICoD (The International Council of Design) whose mission is to increase the recognition of the value of design, elevate the global standards of all design disciplines, and improve the situation of individual designers everywhere.

 

Juliet’s upbringing in four countries (UK, Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa) on two continents and extensive travels have inspired her to create spaces influenced by her global citizenship, some of which can be seen in publications such as SA Décor and Design, SA Home Owner, Designing Ways, Africanism, and Archdaily.  Juliet’s personal Design Motto is that Architecture or Design is achieved once you consider the complexities and interrelationships of human beings and their surroundings. Design education, Curatorship, and Design Foresight are her current research and practice areas of interest.