Architect, historian, and educator Mabel O. Wilson has been named as the 2020 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient by the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Architecture. 

Wilson graduated from UVA with a Bachelor of Science in Architecture in 1985, and has been selected to receive the prestigious award among other "exceptional graduates from the School of Architecture who have demonstrated creativity, innovation, leadership, and vision through their distinguished body of work, within the professional, academic, civic, or artistic realms, as well as their service to the University of Virginia," according to the school's website. 

Professor Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and Professor of African American and African Diasporic Studies at Columbia University. She also serves as the Director of the Institute for the Research in African American Studies, the Director of Graduate Studies for the African American and African Diasporic Studies Department, and the Co-director of Global Africa Lab (GAL) at Columbia University. In addition to her degree from UVA, Wilson earned an M.Arch from Columbia in 1991 and a PhD in American Studies from New York University in 2007. 

Wilson is the founder of design practice Studio &, and has led a variety of critical initiatives that aim to expand and enrich discussions of race and architecture. She is the author of several seminal texts that make "visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal and desire," according to the Columbia University website. Those texts include Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture; Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums; Building Race and Nation: Slavery, Dispossession, and American Civic Architecture; and the co-edited volume Race and Modern Architecture.

Regarding Wilson's selection for the award, UVA SoA Dean Ila Berman explained that “Mabel’s list of accomplishments is truly extraordinary, and the diversity of her work is exceeded only by its excellence and the criticality of its presence in today’s climate. She is one of only a handful of individuals dealing with some of the most difficult issues of our time and encourages us to keep the design disciplines at the center of the building of a more just environment.”

In addition to the award, Mabel O. Wilson will be a guest lecturer at UVA as the 2020 Thomas Jefferson Visiting Professor for the spring 2021 semester. Wilson will be formally presented with the Distinguished Alumni award during the Spring 2021 semester.