Cara Michell is an artist, urbanist, and Assistant Professor of Race & Social Justice in the Built Environment at Northeastern University’s School of Architecture and School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs. Her research and creative practice focus on community-led cartography and decolonial approaches to participatory map-making.
Before joining academia, Cara worked as an Associate and Senior Urban Planner at WXY Studio in NYC, and as an Urban Planner at BrookMcIlroy in Toronto, managing projects that prioritized community voices in coastal resilience planning, transit-oriented development, and urban design. She was recently awarded a prestigious artist residency at the Cité Internationale des arts in Paris (2024-25) for her project “Black Psychogeographies: Transatlantic Community Mapping for a Diaspora.”
Her artwork and participatory workshops have been featured at major cultural institutions, including MoMA PS1, the New Museum, La Mama Galleria, and Creative Time. She was selected for the New Museum’s NEW INC cultural incubator (2022-23) and has received fellowships from the Urban Design Forum and IdeasCity Detroit.
In 2015, Cara co-founded and co-chaired the inaugural Black in Design conference at Harvard University with Courtney Sharpe and the Harvard GSD African American Student Union. Materials from this groundbreaking conference are now archived in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Cara holds a Master of Urban Planning from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts (magna cum laude) in Art & Archaeology from Princeton University, where she trained in studio art and sculpture.
Research/Publications Highlights
“Cartography, Deconstructed: Ateliers Ouverts,” (2025) Open Studio at the Cité Internationale des arts, Paris, France.
“Emergent Emergency Strategies: 11 Takes on Collective Abundance,” in Deem Jorunal, October 11, 2023, edited by Isabel Flower and Alice Grandoit. Authors Lafayette Cruise, Cara Michell, et. al. https://www.deemjournal.com/stories/newinc
“Emergen-C Archive,” La Mama Galleria (2023) – This group exhibition, presented by NEW INC, sheds light on the policies and philosophies that affect both the built environment and the psychologies of those who inhabit it. The works exhibited, including Cara Michell’s participatory mapping table, are rich in non-traditional approaches to archiving from and for marginalized perspectives and forefronts the voices, memories, and potentialities of the disempowered. “Emergen-C Archive” illuminates elements of the past, present, and even future that we deem, collectively, to be important and that are often excluded or expunged from traditional record-keeping. In this, we recognize the need for an emergent-emergency-strategy that, in keeping with the writings of adrienne maree brown, borrows from biomimicry to survive and embrace change with abundance.
“From Building Resilient Infrastructure to Facilitating Resilient Communities (2023)” in Design for Resilient Communities, edited by A. Rubbo et al. will be published this year in Springer Nature Switzerland this year. Authors: Adam Lubinsky, Abby Zan, Nathalie Kauz, and Cara Michell.
“Courtyard Collective,” MoMA PS1 (2022) – I co-developed this anti-exhibition with PS1 Assistant Curator Elena Ketelsen-Gonzales and the Courtyard Coalition. The process-focused program highlights the MoMA’s contemporary art museum Courtyard as a cultural and spatial asset for critical questions at the intersection of cultural institutions, civic space, and urban life. My mapping installation invites members of the Long Island City (LIC) to co-create their own image of the neighborhood. By inviting visitors to annotate the map with their memories, priorities, and dreams (past, present, and future), she asks: What aspects of Long Island City do we want to keep and remember from the past? What are the communities, spaces, and initiatives we want to recognize today? What are our hopes for the future, and how can the Courtyard be a meaningful piece of this constellation?
“Issue 42 Endpapers” The SITE Magazine, Volume 42 (2022) – Anti-Workbook in response to the re-traumatization of BIPOC designers during the global anti-racist awakening; coordinated and edited by Amrit Phull, collaboration with Srishti Bose and Amrit Phull.
“Cooperative Works: Equitable Business Development for Building Retrofits,” Urban Design Forum (2021) – Co-written with Annie White, Polina Bakhteiarov et. Al. Edited by Katherine Sacco. Published by the Urban Design forum in New York.
“Performing Spatial Justice”, The SITE Magazine, Volume 40 (2019) – Article inspired by Master’s Thesis research on cultural misreading and violent injustices in public space. The interdisciplinary project combines personal interviews, urban planning & design strategy, performance art, and theoretical research to create interventions that can interrupt, illuminate, and even subvert spatialized racial profiling. thesitemagazine.com
Occupancies, Boston University Art Galleries (2017) – Exhibited artwork with “Black Body Survival Guide” authors Intelligent Mischief as part of their installation for the Boston University 808 Gallery’s group show. Occupancies selected artists from across the country to exhibit work that highlights the ability of collective and individual bodies to occupy space in resistance to systems of injustice.
Departments
Architecture
Education
- BA, Art and Archaeology (Studio Art Track), Princeton University
- MA, Urban Planning, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design
Awards
- Cité International des Arts, Artist in Residence and 2-12 Laureate
- NEW INC (the New Museum’s Cultural Incubator) Year 9 cohort
- Forefront Fellow, Urban Design Forum, “Cooperative Works” (2020)
- Ideas City, Detroit Fellow, New Museum (2016)
- Excellence in Visual Arts Award, Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts (2014)
Research Focus
- Spatial Justice
- Black Geographies
- Critical Cartography
- Visual Arts
- Community Engagement
- Participatory Mapping
- Psychogeography
Courses Taught
- PPUA 5235: Participatory Community Planning Methods
- ARCH 6330: Topics in Modern Architecture
- ARCH 6340: Participatory Mapping