Young woman sets record at US university, becomes first black woman to earn PhD in Architecture

A young woman named Danielle MCcleave has made history as the first black woman to earn a Doctorate degree in Architecture from the University of Hawaii (UH) in the United States.

Danielle Mccleave earned her Doctorate degree from Manoa School of Architecture at the University of Hawaii, United States.

‘’When I first found out I would be the first Black woman to obtain this degree, I was hit with a variety of emotions. I was excited to be in this position of trailblazing, and I knew it would be encouraging for other Black women looking to get into design,” Danielle said.

Danielle obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree focusing on sculpture and painting from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. She then furthered her studies at the University of Hawaii,Mānoa, where she won the Hawai’i Architectural Foundation award for her thesis on housing titled “Redesigning the Hood: Using Culturally Aware Wellness as a Tool to Inform Architectural Design.”

Though Danielle was happy about her accomplishment, she was partly saddened that she was the first and only one(black) to graduate from the school with the degree since the inception of the school. Her degree serves as a milestone within the industry where out of 116,242 architects in the US, only 2% are Black architects and 0.4% are Black females.

She hopes her achievement will serve as a motivation to the black community to get more involved in architectural design.

“We have learned time and time again that representation matters, and how important it is to be able to see yourself in other people doing different things, so I hope that my journey can be an encouragement for other women and people of color to get into architecture and design,” she said.

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