Cathy Hawley ARB RIBA SFHEA is a practicing architect, a long-term associate with muf architecture/art and a founding partner at Riches Hawley Mikhail. Throughout her career Cathy has combined practice with academic work, she currently leads ADS1 at the Royal College of Art with Matthew Blunderfield. Riches Hawley Mikhail were four times Housing Design Award Winners, BD Housing architect of the Year 2009 and their Clay Field project won an RIBA Award and was mid-listed for the Stirling Prize. Goldsmith Street, a social housing development in Norwich, was awarded the 2019 Stirling Prize.

Cathy is completing a practice-based PhD concerned with housing design and with ad-hoc methods of establishing homes interrogated through the lens of motherhood.  It explores radical housing practices in the context of post-WWII reconstruction and the emerging welfare state in the United Kingdom. Oral histories and first-person narratives are used to explore homemaking in a period of extreme housing shortage through both drawn and written histories.

A recipient of the RIBA Rome Scholarship in Architecture and subsequently a member of the British School at Rome Fine Arts Steering Committee. She has been External Examiner for MA Cities and Innovation at Central St Martins and BA Architecture at London Metropolitan University. 

Instagram @cathy_hawley_