Meet the Team
We are an interdisciplinary team with professional experience as artists, researchers, arts managers, and government administrators.
Mallory Rukhsana Nezam
Mallory Rukhsana Nezam is a cross-sector culture-maker who loves cities and believes that we have the tools to make them more just and joyful. Through her cross-sector practice, Justice + Joy, she engages government, artists, advocacy groups, elected officials, community members and urban planners to de-silo the way we run cities and build new models of creative, interdisciplinary collaboration. She has helped build inaugural arts & culture teams at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council of Boston, Transportation for America and PolicyLink. She was a 2020 Monument Lab Transnational Fellow, a 2019-2020 inaugural Practices for Change Fellow at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute of Design & the Arts and a 2018 National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow and is currently the Curator of Partnerships and Programs for FORWARD, a publication by Forecast Public Art. She holds a Master of Design from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She seeks to be in every room she’s not supposed to be in.
Amanda Lovelee
Amanda Lovelee is an artist who works in civic systems as a translator between government and community with the goal of building places where everyone belongs. She currently works as the Parks Ambassador for the Metropolitan Council based in the Twin Cities where her job is to connect people to the outdoors with a focus on equity. The creative tools Lovelee has created for community engagement and connection have been used and replicated across the US. She is interested in how people connect and the spaces in which they do. Lovelee holds a MFA in Visual Studies from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and BFA in Photography from University of Hartford.
Johanna K.Taylor
Johanna K. Taylor is an Assistant Professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University and director of the graduate program in Creative Enterprise and Cultural Leadership. Her work is grounded in a core value of art as catalyzing force advancing justice in daily life; her research pursues questions of cultural equity through the intersection of art, community, policy, and place. She holds a PhD in Urban Policy from The New School and an MA in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon University. Her book The Art Museum Redefined: Power, Opportunity, and Community Engagement (2020) explores museums disrupting organizational hierarchies by sharing decision making with artists and communities. As an arts administrator she has worked at BRIC Arts|Media, A Blade of Grass, and Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Before joining ASU, she was a Creative Cities Fellow at Stanford University.
CAIR Lab is currently serving as Cultural Policy Fellows with the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies where we are exploring the advancement of arts-based cross-sector collaborations within government—at the federal, state and jurisdictional levels.
