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MASD Visiting Faculty

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MASD Visiting Faculty
In addition to core faculty and staff, MA in Social Design students learn from visiting faculty from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.

View past and present MASD visiting faculty bios below.

MASD Visiting Faculty

2024 - 2025

Sloan Leo Cowan

Sloan Leo Cowan (they/he) joins MASD as the 2024-25 Community Designer in Residence. They are a community designer, facilitator, educator and artist. They are a leading thinker in community design, or facilitation design—the art of helping people work better together. He founded FLOX Studio Inc, a community design and strategy studio that supports mission-driven organizations to animate the practice of their values, where he serves as CEO & Lead Facilitator. Rooted in Black feminist theory, Afrofuturism, and social justice, FLOX engages social impact leaders to collaboratively design their culture, strategy, and organizational development efforts. Cowan joins MASD to facilitate an experimental community design experience (“We’ve Come This Far”) that seeks to expand notions of community and social justice by creating space in the built environment for social intimacy between individual actors in higher education, philanthropy and non-profits. Using the framework of design sprint as dinner party, Sloan Leo will engage students to co-create the experience, craft memorable artifacts and create a community archive.

Dai Danhi '22

Dai Danhi, MASD ‘22 (they/them/theirs) joins MASD as the Program Coordinator for Practice-Based Studio (PBS). In this role, they bring expertise in design strategy, facilitation and project management to MASD’s collaboration with Innovation Works and Ignite Capital. A DMV local, Danhi is a community-driven designer passionate about accountability in community care through research and design. Their work explores the intersection of access, sustainability, and connection. Operating out of a space of humility and compassion, their partnership with their clients and outer community plays a key role. At MASD, they discovered the strength of co-collaborative work within user research, service design and Human-Centered Design.

Myra Margolin

Myra Margolin is a community psychologist with interests in the social structures and everyday choices that perpetuate inequity and white supremacy across generations, as well as the anatomy of social movements that have made meaningful and long-lasting change. Myra has worked as an educator in a range of settings, including many years in the field of youth media. She holds a BFA in film production from New York University and an MA in Community Psychology from the University of Illinois, and has taught with MASD since its inaugural year.

Kennedy McDaniel '22

Kennedy McDaniel, MASD ‘22 (she/her) joins MASD to facilitate a zinemaking and documentation workshop series. Across a series of four workshops during the 2024-25 school year, MASD students will explore the current local landscape of social design through the lens of the self and the other, all while examining the limits and possibilities of the field itself. Born and reared in Baltimore City, Kennedy McDaniel is a Design Strategist and multi-disciplinary creative driven by empathy and equity. She established BLACCINE in 2016, a self-care zine for Black folks with an emphasis on Black Women. She is currently the Design Strategy Manager at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, where she plans and executes design strategy and research across interdisciplinary teams of nurses, researchers, and end users. She received a B.A. in Africana Studies from Johns Hopkins University, and graduated from MASD in 2022.

Jess Obayan

Jess Obayan (she/her) joins MASD to offer a workshop series and personalized consultations with students on design leadership and professional practice. Obayan is an equity design strategist and creative social worker energized by exploring how curiosity, empathy and creativity can illuminate pathways to a more just lived experience. As the Director of Creativity and Co-Design at Design Impact, she believes that we have a right to the power to design the future that we want and deserve. Obayan is a graduate of Boston College Graduate School of Social Work where her studies focused on leadership and social innovation. She approaches social work as a creative practice that relies on our capacity to imagine, design and manifest healing for ourselves and our communities. Motivated by the power of design as a tool for social justice, she completed post-graduate studies in Integrated Design at University of Baltimore.

Annemarie Spitz

Annemarie Spitz is currently a principal at Public Design Bureau and teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. She has led every stage of user-centered research and design, with an emphasis on creating new programs, strategies, and digital and analog tools. Her focus in the social sector is grounded by over 10 years of experience working with non-profit and community-based organizations, including 6+ years collaborating and growing with the team at Greater Good Studio in Chicago. Annemarie has a Bachelors in Architecture, with a focus in American Culture Studies, from Washington University in St. Louis. She then completed a Masters in Design for Sustainability at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where her work concentrated on design research, behavior change, and community facilitation.

Past Collaborators

Denise Shanté Brown

Denise Shanté Brown, MA (she/her) is a Holistic Design Strategist + Founding Director of Black Womxn Flourish. As a queer disabled entrepreneur, holistic design strategist and creative healer, Denise brings forth abundant possibilities for wellbeing with Black womxn through collaborative creativity and community-led practices. Her life's work integrates design as a liberatory tool for healing, health, justice and radical imagination. Throughout her design practice which began in 2012, Denise has deepened her experience in creating spaces for communities who are most impacted by systems of health injustice to design pathways for personal and collective wellbeing. Denise manifested Black Womxn Flourish in 2017 after receiving her Master's degree in Social Design and pioneering the first cohort experience of its kind, Design for the Wellbeing of Black Womxn, fall of that year. In 2019, she was invited to be a panelist at Harvard’s Black in Design conference, “Black Futurism: Creating a More Equitable Future” to share her work on creating spaces for wellness and joy. Her process and practice are grounded in design justice and healing justice principles, emergent strategy, nature, womanism, and the feminine economy.

Cecili Thompson Williams

Cecili Thompson Williams is the Executive Director of Beyond the Bomb, leading a team of kick-ass campaigners and activists to mobilize against the threat of nuclear war and weapons. She has nearly two decades of experience leading mission-driven campaigns with organizations including Amnesty International USA, RESULTS Educational Fund, and the National Partnership for Women & Families. Most recently she founded and served as the Chief Strategist for We Divine Water, a consulting group helping smart and passionate changemakers build strategic and effective campaigns. A strong believer in continually building power and capacity, Cecili has trained thousands of campaigners on how to maximize their impact within their organizations and in the world at large.

Pickett Slater Harrington

Pickett Slater Harrington has spent his career igniting social change. He is the founder and managing principal at Joltage, a social change design firm that champions innovative solutions to social challenges. His work in Baltimore includes partnering with Seawall, a Baltimore-based community developer that believes in using real estate to empower communities, unite cities and launch powerful ideas, to help residents of Baltimore develop a community vision for the transformation of Lexington Market. He is also working with the United Way of Central Maryland as they launch Neighbors United, an initiative to build the capacity of neighborhood residents to identify and work on systemic challenges that impact their community. Pickett has deep experience working within and connecting communities and institutions. He has served in various roles in national nonprofit organizations including the Children’s Defense Fund, the Urban League, and Public Allies. In addition, he has served as manager of leadership development at Independent Sector, a national leadership network of nonprofits and foundations, where he focused on moving a new generation of social change leaders from next to now. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Education and a Master of Social Work. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife and two kids.

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