Melissa Q. Teng is a social practice artist, designer, researcher, and writer living on the ancestral lands of the Massa-adchu-es-et and Pawtucket peoples. Her work often collaboratively explores notions of public safety as belonging and public service as presence. Working across neighborhoods, institutions, and infrastructures, she is always interested in how people come together to bend the world around them.
Her work often explores home, displacement, and belonging, with a particular focus on housing, homelessness, and prisons. Her practice is theoretically informed by urban humanities, critical design studies, participatory design and participatory action research.
Melissa's work has been generously supported by the Collective Futures Fund, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Sasaki Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, MIT's Public Service Center, the City of Boston, and more. Her research about media, design process, crisis and care has been published in Big Data & Society, MIT Thresholds, New Media & Society, the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI), and the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction. Her work as a UX/visual/data designer has been recognized by the Webby’s, Kantar’s Information Is Beautiful, Awwwards, FastCompany’s World Changing Ideas, the New York Times, and others. You can find her CV here.
Her work often explores home, displacement, and belonging, with a particular focus on housing, homelessness, and prisons. Her practice is theoretically informed by urban humanities, critical design studies, participatory design and participatory action research.
Melissa's work has been generously supported by the Collective Futures Fund, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Sasaki Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, MIT's Public Service Center, the City of Boston, and more. Her research about media, design process, crisis and care has been published in Big Data & Society, MIT Thresholds, New Media & Society, the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI), and the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction. Her work as a UX/visual/data designer has been recognized by the Webby’s, Kantar’s Information Is Beautiful, Awwwards, FastCompany’s World Changing Ideas, the New York Times, and others. You can find her CV here.
Updates
- I’m thrilled to have my essay Between Fires published in this year’s Thresholds Journal. It’s about care and witnessing during overlapping crises, dedicated to my best friend and with thanks to the wonderful Garnette Cadogan.
- Grateful to be part of a civic design + art + research collective called See You in the Future with my friends / teachers George Halfkenny, Sabrina Dorsainvil, and Steve Walter. We’re honored to have our work-in-progress highlighted in a special issue of the Boston Art Review, in collaboration with the Collective Futures Fund (CFF). This was extra special because I got to be interviewed by my friend Matthew Okazaki for it.
- Following the advice of a wise friend and mentor, Rashin Fahandej, I’ve been protecting my creative time and enjoying learning about video and audio production. I revisited an old video about my maternal grandparents to help me process and grieve. I shared it with my mom, and I’d love to share it with you.
- I am honored to design a collage for Catherine D’Ignazio’s new book, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action.