Lydia Matthews is a New York and Athens -based curator, writer, and educator. She is the founding Director of the Curatorial Design Research Lab at The New School, where she serves as Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design. Her work explores how contemporary artists, artisans and designers foster critical democratic debates and intimate community interactions in the public sphere, often in response to a variety of urgent global and local conditions in their daily lives.  Selected writing and projects