Melanie Crean + NYC Department of Design and Construction (DDC)
Melanie Crean is an artist and educator whose creative practice focuses on the relationship between systems of control, the body and concepts of time. Working primarily with photography, video, experimental narrative and participatory practice, she researches how architectures of power are represented in media, culture and technology, and explores how these structures can be challenged and re-patterned. Crean is an Associate Professor of Art, Media and Technology and current director of the BFA Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design.
Melanie joins the DDC to help transform a construction site into a platform for exploring, imagining, creating, and enacting connections between neighbors and the public works that impact a neighborhood. Going into her residency, Melanie asks, “how are social and personal narratives inscribed in the built environment, and how might communities surface these stories to preserve them and inform the design process of evolving a site? How can we shift the idea of who is an expert urbanist; so that architects don’t merely present completed designs to local communities for commentary at the end of the process, but rather learn from them from the start? What perspective and shift in power dynamic might community-driven co-design strategies offer agencies and professions that are predominantly hierarchical in structure?”