Lead Curator

Marisa Yiu is co-founder and Executive Director/ Lead Curator of DESIGN TRUST, an initiative of the registered charity Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design. Yiu has been spearheading the creation of long-term and meaningful platforms to curate and fund innovative and thought-provoking investigations in various design disciplines. She conceptualized the Design Trust Futures Studio flagship programme as a design community think-tank on new designs for public micro-parks in Hong Kong, to programmes on Heritage and innovation. She is also an architect and Founding Partner of ESKYIU, a multi-disciplinary and award-winning architecture studio based in Hong Kong, founded in New York in 2005. She was the Chief Curator of the 2009 Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture; curated POP-UP Studio-X Shenzhen at the Value Factory, and along with her partner Eric Schuldenfrei of ESKYIU, the duo has been awarded the prestigious 2010 ‘Architectural League Prize’ for their installations featured in the Venice Biennale, received Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard recognition, ‘Design for Asia Award’ for Ephemera, commissioned by Swire Properties Art Basel and Movement culture: installation for Ido Portal. Their studio recently designed the interior architecture and landscape strategies for the 22-storey office tower K11 Atelier King’s Road project, featuring sustainable to heritage elements and a multi-functional exhibition venue. Yiu has been active in lecturing internationally such as Princeton University on ‘Alternative practices’; the China NEXT symposium organized by Architectural Record, UNESCO forum on ‘Historic Urban Landscapes’ in Vietnam, and the AsiaGSD ‘Specific Weights of Architecture: Asian Probes’ conference at Harvard University. She also formerly taught architecture at the Architectural Association in London; New York’s Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; Parsons School of Design; Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong (2007-2010) and at the School of Architecture, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2010-2014), and since then she has been focusing with passion on DESIGN TRUST’s projects and programmes in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area region with its international partners.