Rita Khalaf, a board member of The Return and a returnee architect, recently took part in two major events in Iraq that brought together professionals and scholars around themes of reconstruction and heritage.
In October 2025, she was a speaker at the Arab Architecture Festival in Baghdad, held from October 1 to 5 under the patronage of the Iraqi Prime Minister and organized by the Tamayouz Excellence Award. The festival gathered architects from across the world to exchange ideas on heritage, culture, landscape, sustainability, and resilient cities. Rita’s presentation focused on the reconstruction of Mosul, marking the first time she presented her doctoral research in Arabic, and in her home country, an important moment in her professional and personal journey.
A few weeks later, on November 4, she spoke again in Erbil, at the citadel, during a conference organized by the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo). Her talk, titled “The Monument and the Ordinary: Research on the Architectural Reconstruction of Mosul” attracted around forty participants. She discussed the balance between monumental and everyday architecture in the city’s recovery process, and how these two dimensions together shape Mosul’s evolving urban identity.
Rita Khalaf was born in Mosul and emigrated to France with her family in the early 2000s. She is an architect and a doctoral candidate at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris Val-de-Seine, where her research focuses on Mosul’s reconstruction with a particular emphasis on the architecture of the city from the 1950s to the 1980s. Beyond academia, she is a founding and board member of The Return. Rita divides her time between France and Iraq, collaborating regularly with local actors on post-ISIS rebuilding efforts and heritage preservation. She embodies the idea of a returnee who reconnects with and rebuilds her homeland.
