Masoom Moitra
Part-time Lecturer
Email
moitm249@newschool.edu
Office Location
L - 2 West 13th Street
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Profile
Masoom Moitra is a Brooklyn-based, Mumbai-grown urban practitioner focused on people-led planning, design, architecture, education, and arts. Since 2010, Masoom has collaborated with community groups, government stakeholders, scholars, activists, and researchers across the world to develop participatory plans and frameworks that champion equity, self-determination, and justice.
Currently a part of the Reimagining NYC cultural urban policy project with NOCD-NY and Arts & Democracy, Masoom's work on the ground has ranged from researching creative affordable housing in some of the densest informal settlements of Mumbai, to designing participatory think tanks in Quito, from Navajo Nation-based efforts towards entrepreneurial alternatives on indigenous lands, to cultural organizing grassroots policy projects with public housing residents in Brooklyn, and supporting the engagement of over 180,000 New Yorkers in the development of CreateNYC—New York City’s first comprehensive cultural plan. She has served as the first Director of the The Shape of Cities to Come Institute (SCCI) and as the Director of El Puente's Green Light District through which she helped lead the Nuestro Aire/ Our Air environmental justice campaign.
Masoom was the co-Director of The New School Collaboratory, a platform for civic engagement and knowledge production at Parsons School of Design, where she has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in people-led design and planning for the past ten years. Her work has been showcased at the Territorial Urgency: Urban Strategies for Social Justice exhibition at the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, the Urban Embodiments exhibit at Falchi Building, and as a part of the Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities exhibition at MoMA, New York. Masoom's writing and interviews have been featured in several online publications and reports including Domus, the Indypendent and CUNY TV. A practicing artist-poet and spiritual nerd, Masoom has the honor of mothering a contemplative toddler.