Jeffrey Yoo Warren (he/him) is a Korean American artist educator, illustrator, community scientist and researcher in Providence, RI, whose recent work combines ancestral craft practices and creative work with diasporic memory through virtual collaborative worldbuilding. He has spent years creating collaborative community science projects which decenter dominant culture in environmental knowledge production. Jeff is an educator with Movement Education Outdoors and AS220, and part of the New Old art collective with Aisha Jandosova, hosting art-making and storytelling events with older adults; he is also the 2023 Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress for his ongoing project Seeing Lost Enclaves: Relational reconstructions of erased historic neighborhoods of color.

His current artistic practice investigates how people build identity and strength through their interactions with artifacts and histories, and the ways that objects can tell stories that people can be part of in the present.

I am an instructor at AS220 Community Studios and served three terms on the Open Source Hardware Association board since 2014. I have an MS from MIT and a BA in Architecture from Yale University, and spent much of that time working with artist/technologist Natalie Jeremijenko, building robotic dogs.

Public Lab

In 2010, I co-founded Public Lab, a community science network and non-profit dedicated to democratizing science to address environmental issues that affect people. After 10 years as Director of Research, I stepped down at the start of 2020.

Work

My work, including collaborations and collaborative designs whose development I led as part of my open source work at Public Lab, has been exhibited at the MIT Museum (2018), Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City (2017), the Queens Museum (2016), the Art Center Nabi in Seoul, Korea (2017), ArtScience Museum in Singapore (2016), Somerset House in London (2016), Centre of Contemporary Culture Barcelona (2015), the Design Museum in London (2014), and the Milan Triennale (2008).

Events

I have led community science workshops and organized events at the Design Studio for Social Intervention’s inPublic (2019) and SERC (2018), Le Janbyr in Almaty, Kazakhstan (2019), AS220 Industries in Providence, Rhode Island (2018-9), the Universidad Católica de Chile in Valdivia (2019), various Public Lab Barnraisings (2011-2019), the Gathering of Open Science Hardware (2018 and 2017), Open Institute in Maderia (2017), the Waag Society in Amsterdam (2014), FAB10 in Barcelona (2015), UNI in Lima (2011), and the Whitney Musuem (2011). I also participate in New Old and Tockwotton Makes, intergenerational making workshops organized by Aisha Jandosova in Providence, RI.

I have given talks and presentations at EXPERIMENTA CDMX - AGUA in Mexico City (2019), Stanford’s Digital Impact initiative (2019), LibrePlanet (2018), the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (2017), MIT ClimateX (2017), FAB10 Barcelona (2015), Mediamatic (Amsterdam, 2013), the Open Hardware Summit (2013) and Ars Electronica’s Accountability Tech Symposium (2012).

Photo by Christopher Villafuerte CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Lead photo by Dakota Lenox photography