Sophie Weston Chien is a designer-organizer.

She is a practitioner and an educator who builds community power through social and physical infrastructure to ensure people can shape their own spaces. She views the disciplines of design and the roles of designers as sites of continuous self-construction. 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. As a designer-organizer, her work builds spatial and social relationships.

Sophie is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder, Environmental Design Program. She is one-half of the collaboration just practice and co-founder of Seeding Pedagogies Collaborative. Sophie is a core organizer for Design As Protest Collective, active in Dark Matter U, and on the Board of Directors at DesignxRI.

Sophie has been published in Log, PAIRS, DISC, Harvard Urban Review, Paprika!, Architect Magazine, Portals: Pedagogy, Practice, and Architecture’s Future Imaginary (Actar), spoken at Harvard, University of Waterloo, RISD, University of Tennessee, and on the podcast Clever. She has exhibited at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Boston Public Library, Harvard, MIT, Yale, RISD, Brown, Mississippi State, and completed residencies at I-Park and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Sophie taught a J-Term class at Harvard called Apocalypse Now and served as a Teaching Fellow at RISD Architecture. Sophie has worked for National Park Service in Nome, Agency Landscape + Planning in Cambridge, Oualalou + Choi in Paris, LA-Màs in Los Angeles, and the Biden/Harris Campaign in Charlotte. Sophie has a Master's in Landscape Architecture and Master's in Urban Planning from Harvard Graduate School of Design as a Dean’s Merit Scholar, and a BFA/Bachelor of Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design with a minor in Politics and Policy and served as Student Body President, AIA Diversity Advancement Scholar, and Maharam Fellow.

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++ reach me at sophiewchien@gmail.com, view my cv here.

My work can be seen in person at upcoming shows at the MIT Museum (fall 2024) and the Boulder Public Library (fall 2025)

friends + collaborators: Amanda Ugorji, Catherine Park, Emma Werowinski, Jasmine Gutbrod, Laurence von Lignau, Patrick Hulse, Sahil Mohan, SeungWook Tommy Maing, Will Zhang, Austin Sun, Bz Zhang, christin hu, Emily Wettstein, Kira Schnitzler, Deborah Tsogbe, Raphaele Tayvah, Deena Darby, Kiki Cooper