A bit about Candy Chang

The Stone Cold Facts

Candy Chang is a public installation artist, designer, and urban planner who likes to make cities more comfortable for people. She co-founded Civic Center, an urban design studio in New Orleans where she combines architecture, graphic design, and urban planning to make thoughtful public spaces and communication tools for everyday issues of city life. She’s passionate about redefining the ways we use public space to share information important to our neighborhoods and to our individual well-being.
She’s a 2011 TED Senior Fellow and a 2011 Tulane University/Rockefeller Foundation Urban Innovation Challenge Fellow. She holds a B.S. in Architecture, a B.F.A. in Graphic Design, and a Master’s degree in Urban Planning from Columbia University. After co-founding design firm & record label Red Antenna in New York City, she collaborated with community organizations on urban design projects in New York, Nairobi, Vancouver, New Orleans, and Johannesburg. She was an art director at The New York Times and a design researcher at Nokia. She was also a project leader for Global Studio and a fellow at the Spatial Information Design Lab. She has performed electro in New York, Detroit, and Grenoble and her work has been exhibited at the National Design Museum, Koltsovo International Airport, and many humble sidewalks.
Her parents immigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. and she grew up in the cornfields of Ohio and beyond. After years in NYC and Helsinki, she now lives in New Orleans where she’s loving porches, palm trees, and ceiling fans while working on public art projects, big and small. She believes that one of the greatest things in life is spending time in public places with the people you love. She also believes that these spaces can better serve the people who live, work, and play in them.