Lawson, Cynthia

Cynthia Lawson is a Brooklyn-based Colombian digital artist, technologist and educator. Her artwork, centered around themes of time and transience, has been internationally exhibited and performed. She self-published "Of and In Cities," and two books about "Cross Urban," an ongoing collaboration, since 2008, with artist Klaus Fruchtnis. In 2012 she was appointed to the advisory board of ISEA's Latin American Forum.Her published research is in the area of community-engaged design education. Since 2007 she has been an active participant in, and now coordinates, the university-wide project DEED: Development Through Empowerment, Entrepreneurship, and Design. This work has been featured in the NY Daily News and the TV show LatiNation. She has written many papers on this topic including an article in the peer-reviewed journal Visible Language. Lawson has two upcoming keynote presentations _ at the design and innovation conference Dinova in Bogot_ and the Global Fashion Conference in Madrid.Prior to joining academia full-time, Lawson was an educational technologist for Columbia University's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. As a consultant she has worked with international organizations such as CARE and the World Bank. Lawson was born in Guatemala and lived in Iran, United States, Colombia, Argentina, and France. She was raised bilingual (Spanish and English) and is fluent in French. She has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Universidad de los Andes (Bogot_) and a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) from New York University. She is a founding member of Occupy University.