Building the conditions for durable change

East Boston Spatial Justice Lab

The challenge

East Boston faces intersecting pressures from housing instability, displacement, environmental risk, and a history of being planned around rather than with. Legal and policy responses often separate these conditions even though residents experience them as one interconnected system.

My role

I created and led the East Boston Spatial Justice Lab as a community-engaged research and programming initiative within NuLawLab. I served as Principal Investigator on the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab Award and helped establish the partnerships and research infrastructure supporting the work.

The systems intervention

The lab connected participatory research, cultural organizing, spatial inquiry, legal empowerment, and community programming. It created structures through which residents and community organizations could shape the research agenda, produce knowledge, and connect lived experience to institutional and policy questions.

What it established

The lab became an infrastructure for continued work rather than a single research project. It anchors the Neighborhood Eviction Defense Project and ongoing research into how communities develop and sustain collective legal capacity.

What endured

The East Boston Spatial Justice Lab continues at NuLawLab, along with its community relationships, research agenda, and developing work on neighborhood eviction defense and collective legal capacity.

Stable Ground

The challenge

Housing instability is usually approached through legal, economic, and administrative systems. Those systems often lack sustained ways to engage the cultural, emotional, spatial, and relational consequences of displacement.

My role

I created Stable Ground from a trial artist residency I developed in 2013. I secured a $200,000 Kresge Foundation grant for its first phase and a $250,000 renewal to expand the program.

The systems intervention

Stable Ground embedded artists within Boston’s housing-stability system. Artists worked in relationship with city agencies, community organizations, and residents, creating ways for lived experiences of housing instability and trauma to enter public and policy conversations.

The program treated cultural practice as part of civic infrastructure — not as communication added after policy decisions had already been made.

What it established

Stable Ground connected creative placemaking, housing policy, community knowledge, and institutional learning. Its second phase demonstrated that the model could be sustained and expanded beyond an initial pilot.

What endured

The work established a model for using long-term artist residencies to connect community experience with institutional and policy systems.

NuLawMaps

The challenge

Conventional maps and datasets can make systemic harm visible while separating data points from the people and experiences they represent.

My role

I led a team of designers and developers through the conception, development, testing, and launch of NuLawMaps, a GIS platform combining spatial data with storytelling.

The systems intervention

The platform was designed so that qualitative accounts and human stories could remain connected to geographic data. It created an infrastructure through which communities and organizations could document patterns, communicate lived experience, and produce spatial evidence.

Where it traveled

The Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law used the platform to map informal-settlement evictions in Sweden. The Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health used it to document ten years of workplace deaths in Massachusetts.

What endured

NuLawMaps remains an example of how a platform can connect data, place, narrative, and public action without reducing people to data points.

Story Circle & the Social Design Collective

A public art commission funded by Related LA and the City of Santa Ana that I turned into an infrastructure project: I founded the Social Design Collective to hold it, hired and managed artists and educators, co-developed an arts curriculum for every student at Garfield Elementary School, and worked with fabricators, planners, and architects to build and install the work.

The community defined the scope and shape of the project. That was the point.

Social Practices Art Network (SPAN)

I launched SPAN as an international grassroots resource for people working in socially engaged art. It grew into an ongoing research and interview project, then into an international survey study reaching over 500 artists, run in partnership with Open Engagement, Arts Quest at University of the Arts London, and DotToDot Arts.

Public Artist in Residence, New York City

The Social Design Collective participated in the first cohort of New York City’s Public Artist in Residence program. Our team worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Harlem Veterans Center, and women veterans across the city.

Miscellaneous Productions

Co-founder and artistic producer. I built the model and pedagogy for a program that trained groups of youth and elders using anti-racism and anti-violence methods combined with community-based art. Funded by the Government of Canada's National Crime Prevention Strategy, the Canada Council for the Arts, and others, and later cited in national research on youth gang violence prevention.