Providence
Marisa Angell Brown is the Associate Director of the Center for Complexity at Rhode Island School of Design. She is a historian, educator and curator whose work focuses on the intersections between art, design, community and justice, with a special interest in preservation, public memory, public art and spatial practice. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, Places Journal, Perspecta, Manual, Buildings and Landscapes, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and her curatorial projects have been featured in Metropolis, Architectural Record, the Associated Press, the Providence Journal and the Public’s Radio. Brown teaches college-credit courses at the women’s prison in Rhode Island with College Unbound and teaches a graduate seminar at Rhode Island School of Design titled Art and Design as Community Practice. Before joining the Center for Complexity, she was an Assistant Director at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, where she taught graduate seminars in preservation and the public humanities and directed community partnerships, public programs and research initiatives on placekeeping, public art, museum practice, and public history.
Brown received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from Yale University and has a Master of Arts from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor’s from Princeton University. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and on the board of the Rhode Island State House Restoration Society. She is Korean American and grew up in Dubai and New York City. She lives in Fox Point, Providence with her spouse, two teen-aged children and their beloved family dog, Molly.