Jesse Shapins is a media theorist, digital humanist, documentary artist, and social entrepreneur. Through a hybrid practice of interactive design, public intervention, architectural theory, and experimental pedagogy, his work experiments in mapping the imagination and perception of place between physical, virtual and social space.
He is the co-creator of: Zeega, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner that is an open-source HTML5 platform for creating interactive documentaries and inventing new forms of storytelling; Yellow Arrow, a seminal project in locative media that involved cities, stickers, mobile phones, and participants in over 450 cities in 39 countries, transforming the urban landscape into a “deep map” that expresses the personal histories and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces; Mapping Main Street, a collaborative documentary with NPR that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets; Stadtblind, a gallery and urban research studio focused upon challenging the urban imaginaries of Berlin; and the UnionDocs Collaborative, a laboratory for documentary research and production in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Jesse’s scholarly and artistic work has been published in PRAXIS, Places, Metropolis, The New York Times, Wired, Libération, Berliner Zeitung, Taiwan Daily News, and been exhibited at MoMA, Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, architekturgalerie am weißenhof and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, among other venues.
Jesse is Co-Founder/Associate Director of metaLAB (at) Harvard, a new hub for innovation in arts, media and humanities at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Jesse is also on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he is an Instructor of Architecture and has invented courses such as the The Mixed-Reality City (w/ James Burns) and Media Archaeology of Place (w/ Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ernst Karel). Previously, he co-taught the studio/seminar Critical Urban Media Arts: An Experimental Workshop in Urban Research, Mapping and Representation (w/ Brian House) at Columbia University’s GSAPP. He 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 also a PhD Candidate in Urbanism and Critical Media Practice at the GSD. His dissertation is titled “Mapping the Urban Database Documentary: Utopias of Panoramic Perception, Sensory Estrangement and Networked Participation.”