About
As a lifelong student of liberation, I study and research ways to imagine, build, and embody worlds where all living beings can be free from cultures of domination, exploitation, and abuse.
My practices take many forms, but I frequently return to design, strategy, education, collective organizing, and media art as my primary outlets for experimentation and meaning-making. These practices represent my commitment to building imaginative and pluriversal worlds of possibility. Possibilities that continually challenge the oppressive and inequitable defaults that I and so many of us have inherited.
Like me, this website is in perpetual progress.
Selected work
Education
I’ve channeled much hope and love into youth futures. For over 14 years, I’ve collaborated with brilliant young people who have shown me how to create unapologetically, when to take a leap of faith, how to guide, and when to get out of the way. Learn more ⬇️
Facilitation
Few experiences have humbled and grown me more than initiating a health justice collective. To know me is to know that I remain indebted to my Creative Resilience Collective co-organizers and collaborators. A debt of gratitude for embarking on a seven-year journey of continual personal and collective death and rebirth. We stumbled through the dark more times than I can count. I wish I’d known what I know now, but our work together grew me and I am wiser for it. Wise enough to know when I don’t know. Wise enough not to bite off more than I can chew. Wise enough to accept a helping hand. Wise enough to move away from traditional forms of leadership that reproduce leaders and followers. I am forever changed by our youthful ambitions to “shape the evolution of care towards liberation and joy.” A forthcoming digital archive will be available in 2025. To learn more about our past efforts see our Instagram page linked below ⬇️.
Designer
By day, I work with my brilliant colleagues at the PHL Service Design Studio. Since February 2020, our small corner of the world has remained steadfast in our practice to center trauma-responsive, accessible, decolonial, and queer design methods to ensure that the people impacted by government decisions are involved in matters that impact their lives and well-being. Since 2020 I’ve co-led efforts to create standards of practice that push the City of Philadelphia to collaboratively design services, programs, and policies with excluded and systemically oppressed residents. Prior to my work in service design, I designed interactive exhibits for museums and public spaces at Local Projects. Learn more ⬇️
Affiliations
Speaking
I regularly facilitate workshops about design justice, co-design, youth leadership, collectivism, community engagement, mental health, health justice, public art, and ways to build and share power.
For future speaking and workshop inquiries, send me an email.
🗓️
November 16, 2023
Location:
Virtual event
Link to recording
🗓️
June 9, 2023
Venue:
Pratt Insitute School of Design
212 Steuben St
Brooklyn, NY 11205
Steuben 408 (Design Center)
Sign up
What opportunities for intimacy with oneself and others does collective art and design initiatives centering healing offer? Can connection at the point of vulnerability be the antidote to the loneliness of trauma? This presentation seeks to reflect on these very questions through the founding of a mental health and healing justice organization I initiated in 2017.
Drawing inspiration from Shawn Ginwright, this presentation embraces a healing-centered over a trauma-informed approach. Through this lens, trauma is seen as a collective experience that requires holistic methods involving culture, spirituality, civic action, and healing for oneself and others. This distinction aims to acknowledge that trauma-informed approaches often focus more on one’s injury, leading to clinical and individualized forms of symptom management. By embracing a healing-centered approach to collective art and design, this presentation calls for strength-based methods that foster:
- Connection: A practice of creating spaces for interdependent ways of making and being vulnerable with oneself and others. Through connection, we enact mutual forms of witnessing, listening, and affirming each other's growth as we learn and unlearn together.
- Care: A practice of providing political, social, material, and/or emotional support in service of ensuring another living being can thrive and be well. Through care, we better understand how to show up for our needs and others.
- Courage: A practice of challenging norms, sharing personal truths, and manifesting audacious acts of liberation despite doubt and fear. Through courage, we can better work with uncertainty over comfort and the status quo.
- Collaboration: A practice of uplifting the unique wisdom and gifts inherent in every living being by sharing decision-making power. Through collaboration, we make space for multiple perspectives, experiences, and truths to better be in relationships with ourselves and others.
🗓️
March 3, 2023
Critical UX: Challenging the Dogma of UX
Venue:
Virtual panel
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March 31, 2023
Visual Practices & Experimental Geographies
Venue:
Virtual panel
A panel moderated by Forest Kelley, Assistant Professor, University of Kentucky and James A. Enos.
🗓️
March 3, 2023
The City of Philadelphia’s Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit: Towards a Shared Vision and Practice.
Venue:
Virtual presentation
🗓️
January 26, 2023
No Such Thing as Normal
Venue:
Virtual Panel
Sign up
🗓️
January 20 2022
Dome Making a Seat at the Table
Venue:
Virtual Panel
🗓️
June 14, 2021
Building a Practice of Equity-Centered Design:
Venue:
Team presentation
See recording (31:25)
🗓️
April 1, 2021
Venue:
Virtual Panel
Sign up
🗓️
November 12, 2020
On Staying Together: A Collective Art and Design Practice in Pursuit of Healing Justice
Venue:
Virtual Panel
Sign up
🗓️
October, 2020
Venue:
Virtual Panel
© Ngan 2024