Debbie Chen

Debbie Chen is interested in systems of organization that transform the pragmatic into the sublime. Her projects often leverage mundane and overlooked considerations of material ecologies and industrial processes to produce rhizomatic and euphoric understandings of our built environment, rendering the invisible yet wide-reaching forces of infrastructure palpable. A licensed architect in New York and Wisconsin, Chen currently serves as Graduate Program Director and Assistant Professor at RISD. Prior to RISD, she was the 2021–22 Architectural Activism Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she explored the representation of climate activism through gameplay.