Sophie Weston Chien

Community Engagement | Social Justice | Fabrication | Environmental Justice

Sophie Weston Chien is a designer-organizer: a practitioner and an educator who builds community power through social and physical infrastructure to ensure people can shape their own spaces. Sophie’s practice draws on her training as an architectural and landscape designer, planner, and political organizer. This work integrates her experience in the built environment with writing, textile art, and graphic design. She often does this work in collaboration—Sophie is a leader in the Design As Protest Collective (DAP), Dark Matter U (DMU), and the partnership just practice. Multi-racial and liberation-oriented, her work with these collectives aims to infiltrate institutions to proliferate anti-racist design methods and research. 

Sophie has shared her work at cultural institutions (Boston Public Library, Boston Society of Architects, Boulder Public Library), academic institutions (University of Waterloo, Harvard, Middlebury, Northeastern, University of Oregon), and mainstream platforms (Architect’s Newspaper, Clever) and has been a resident at Art Omi: Architecture, I-Park, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. She has exhibited at Biennales/Triennales (Venice, Lisbon, Timișoara), Data Through Design (NYC), the District Architecture Center (DC), and was awarded the inaugural City Talks Digital Gallery Award from the Spatial Analysis Lab at USC. Her work is in the permanent collection of the MIT Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

Professionally, Sophie has worked at a wide range of places: the National Park Service (Nome, Alaska), Agency Landscape + Planning (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Oualalou + Choi (Paris, France), and LA-Más (now Office Of: Office, Los Angeles, California). She is a former board member of the design innovation non-profit DESIGNxRI. Sophie has a Master's in Landscape Architecture and a Master's in Urban Planning from Harvard Graduate School of Design as a Dean’s Merit Scholar and a BFA and Bachelor of Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design. She previously served as the Inaugural Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow for Faculty Diversity in the Environmental Design Department at CU Boulder. She was born in Charlotte, North Carolina.