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Jesse Shapins is a spatial media theorist, documentary artist and social entrepreneur who lives between New York and Cambridge. His work experiments in mapping the imagination and perception of place across different media. He is the Co-Creator of Mapping Main Street (2009), UnionDocs (2005), Yellow Arrow (2004), and The Colors Berlin (2003), amongst other works.

His writing and collaborative projects have been published in PRAXIS, Places, Metropolis, The New York Times, Wired, Liberation, El País, Berliner Zeitung, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, and been exhibited at MoMA (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), Deutsches Architektur Zentrum (Berlin), architekturgalerie am weißenhof (Stuttgart) and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts (Cambridge), among other venues. He has taught at Pratt Institute and Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he co-created the studio/seminar "Critical Urban Media Arts: An Experimental Workshop in Urban Research, Mapping and Representation" (2008). His projects have been funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Association for Independents in Radio, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, the Provostial Funds for Arts and Humanities at Harvard University, among others.

Jesse holds a B.A in Urban Studies, summa cum laude, from Columbia University, along with an A.M. in Architecture from Harvard University. He is completing a PhD in the History and Theory of Urbanism and Media Studies, a dual degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. His evolving dissertation "Archaeologies of the Urban Database Imaginary: Documentary Media in Urban Research and Experimental Cartography from the 1920s to the Contemporary" exposes a pre-history of today's geo-located media arts, architectural and urbanist practices. The center of this historical and theoretical project is György Kepes and Kevin Lynch's "The Perceptual Form of the City," a multimedia investigation of metropolitan Boston in the 1950s conducted at MIT.

In addition to Kepes and Lynch's work, the project also addresses an extended geneaology of the city symphony genre, including the photography, films and screenplays of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in conjunction with the films and writings of Dziga Vertov; Robert Smithson's re-mapping of New Jersey; Venturi, Scott-Brown & Izenour's Learning from Las Vegas; and Reyner Banham's 1974 BBC documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles.