Alison Killing, the British-born and Netherlands-based designer who in 2021 was named the first-ever architect to win the Pulitzer Prize, has been tapped to lead a new visual investigations unit supported by the Financial Times. The paper announced the appointment on Thursday. 

Killing will work under the title Senior Investigations Reporter and expand on a body of work that includes the Putlizer-winning investigation for The New York Times into Muslim detention camps operating in China’s Xinjiang province. The published reporting led the country to withdraw from this year’s Venice Biennale while shedding light on the difficulties journalists and human rights advocates face in performing open-source research in authoritarian regimes across the world.

Killing was educated in the UK and later immigrated to the Netherlands to found her practice Killing Architects in 2010. The financial downturn of the time caused her to venture into curation and researching vacant buildings. She would later expand into geopolitics-geared experience design before leaving the building trade altogether in 2018 in pursuit of what she said is the need to "think in 3D."

Projects like 2014's Death in Venice and the 2019 Buzzfeed investigation into mass surveillance preceded the Pulitzer Prize recognition, adding to the work fellow architects such as Eyal Weizman (of Forensic Architecture) and prominent firms like Diller Scofidio + Renfro and others have equally helped to pioneer surrounding data visualization's ability to document social issues that in many cases go unseen.

In her new role, Killing will work closely with three other journalists. The FT investigative team has already won awards over stories that covered the UK's faulty push for net-zero emissions by 2050 and the invasion of Ukraine. The publication's editor Roula Khalaf said Killing's addition will "bring new capabilities to the FT that will deliver more high-impact investigative visual journalism."

More of her firm's visual investigations can be found here.