Catherine D'Ignazio Biography

Catherine D'Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. She also serves as the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab, which employs data and computational approaches to promote gender and racial justice, particularly as it relates to space and location. D'Ignazio is a feminist technology researcher, artist/designer, and hacker who focuses on data literacy and civic participation. She has organized reproductive justice hackathons, built talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and conducted walking data visualizations to anticipate the future of sea-level rise. She co-founded Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities designed to educate beginners to data science, with Rahul Bhargava. Her co-authored 2020 book Data Feminism maps a roadmap for more ethical and powerful data science techniques. Her work at the confluence of technology, design, and social justice has appeared in the Journal of Peer Production, the Journal of Community Informatics, and the proceedings of the Human Factors in Computing Systems conference (ACM SIGCHI). Her art and design projects have received Tanne Foundation, Turbulence.org, and Knight Foundation grants, and have been shown at the Venice Biennial and the ICA Boston. Prior to joining MIT, D'Ignazio was an Assistant Professor of Data Visualization and Civic Media in the Journalism Department at Emerson College, taught for seven years in the Digital + Media graduate program at Rhode Island School of Design, and did freelance software development for over ten years. She has an MS from the MIT Media Lab, an MFA from Maine College of Art, and a BA in International Relations from Tufts University (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa). D'Ignazio has lived in Buenos Aires, Paris, and Catalunya and speaks English, Spanish, and French. She is a co-founder of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, an internationally unknown spatial justice group, and an organizer with the Public Laboratory for Open Technology & Science. D'Ignazio is a proud board member of Indigenous Women Rising, an organization dedicated to advancing Native and Indigenous Peoples' fundamental right to fair and culturally safe health care.

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