Silvia Balzan is an architect, visual designer and a transdisciplinary researcher in history and theory of architecture, urban design, and visual and historical anthropology. Her research interests lie in the social and political implications of modern colonial architecture and urban planning and its postcolonial afterlives through the theoretical lens of material culture studies and environmental history, foregrounding ethnographic research methodologies proper of historical and visual anthropology in historiographical writings.  In her practice of inquiry, she actively combines archival research with socially-engaged photography and oral history, conceiving images as sources and as research outputs. Silvia holds postgraduate degrees from IUAV Venice (BSc and MSc in Architecture with honors, 2010), FHNW Academy of Art and Design (MA in Visual Communication and Iconic Research, 2017), and a Ph.D. in social anthropology and architectural history and theory from the University of Basel (June 2022). She is currently co-editing an upcoming volume titled Participatory Images (Transcript Verlag, 2023) and developing a manuscript based on her dissertation Socio-spatial Alternative in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique: Pancho Guedes and the Protestant Missions.  Her writings have appeared on Ardeth, Log 51, Joehlo Journal of Architectural Culture, Trans Magazine and for Mimesis Edizioni. Other forthcoming contributions include a chapter in edited volumes Mending and Repairing Across Africa for Berghahn Books Anthropology, Oxford. Silvia serves as a co-organizer and designer of the online inter-institutional platform for PhDs, PostDocs, and ECRs in Architectural History and Theory, Landscape and the City: DocTalks (doctalks.net) run by a team of researchers from the University of Basel, ETH Zurich/gta, McGill and Harvard GSD.