DSI - MFA in Design for Social Innovation

SAVE THE DATE 🗓️Join us June 21 for creative conversations on solidarity, legacy, activism, and art with Akemi Kochiyama-Ladson, traci kato-kiriyama + special guests ✨ RSVP Eventbrite link in bio or dm us

⚡️Akemi Kochiyama-Ladson .kochiyama speaking on the Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project which honors Yuri’s legacy and carries on her commitment to bring people together and build cross movement, cross racial solidarity in support of human rights, dignity and self-determination for all oppressed people.

⚡️traci kato-kiriyama reading from their book of poetry, Navigating With(out) Instruments, and talking about a new installation-performance-community organizing project linking actions and conversations on provenance, Reparations, solidarity, collective healing, and the reclamation of “items” that are missing/stolen/lost.

✨MFA Design for Social Innovation is excited to host this event at the DSI studio, to share projects, engage in conversations, mingle over snacks, and stimulate meaningful interaction and connections among all present.

⚡️ New dates and a lower course fee! ⚡️

Dates: Tuesdays and Thursdays, June 2 – 25, 2026
Time: 7:00 – 8:30 PM ET
Location: Virtual
Course fee: $400
Register at the link in bio!

This course is for creatives, designers, and thinkers with a project, idea, or question they’re ready to deepen and develop. Participants will use their own work as a container to explore how body-based practices can support creative clarity, direction, and momentum, as well as insight. Each week will follow a rhythm of practice and application. On Tuesdays, sessions will be led by embodied practitioners sharing real-world tools and approaches. Thursdays will be project labs to test ideas, receive feedback, and move your work forward. Participants will leave with: a more developed project, a personalized embodied design practice, and tools to navigate creative blocks and decision-making. Grounded in somatics, movement, and sensory design, this course centers on care and sustainability to support people in working with greater clarity, responsiveness, and resilience.

*Proceeds from this course help to grow the MFA Design for Social Innovation scholarship fund.*

As a trained architect, movement artist, and interdisciplinary embodied designer, Kimberly Tate’s work focuses on cultural restoration, community building, and ecological care. Kimberly has collaborated with artists and organizations, including Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts, Akim Funk Buddha, Walang Hiya NYC, and Moving Rasa. She has presented at venues and festivals including The Highline, Insitu Site Specific Dance Festival, Downtown Brooklyn Arts Festival, BAM Cafe Live, and Women to the Front. She was a Laundromat Project Create Change Fellow and a Designer in Residence with SVA MFA Design for Social Innovation. She is also a faculty member at Parsons School of Design, and a K–12 design educator with the AIANY Center for Architecture.

MFA DSI Class of 2026, a beautiful day celebrating your graduate journeys 🎓💫

“If you don’t do everything you can to change things, it will remain the same. You only pass this way once. So you need to give it all you got.” —John Lewis

Give it all you’ve got!! ✊
We 💛 you!

2 DAYS AWAY! Join MFA DSI’s Thesis Show, May 12, to learn about Wenxin Yang’s, Between Care and Self. Between Care and Self, in partnership with the Chinese American Nurses Association, is an AI-assisted language tool for Chinese nurses in New York that creates space for articulating lived experiences at work through non-clinical, experience-based prompts.

RSVP today at the link in bio.

TUESDAY! Join MFA DSI’s Thesis Show, May 12, to learn about Ziye Peng’s, Nexxt Level. Nexxt Level is for women in the gaming ecosystem to co-create shared strategy, political solidarity, and creative authorship; cultivating allied collaboration and feminist constellations.

RSVP today at the link in bio.

Join MFA DSI’s Thesis Show, May 12, to learn about Steven (Yifeng) Zhang’s, Queens Commute Atlas. Queens Commute Atlas is a civic mapping project that documents transit burden in Queens, New York. The Atlas maps and synthesizes rider-submitted commute stories of delays, crowding, safety, and unreliable service into collective evidence for more connected and equitable transit.

RSVP today at the link in bio.

Join MFA DSI’s Thesis Show, May 12, to learn about Candice Walker’s, When I Think of Home (WITH) JC. When I Think of Home (WITH) JC is a community-centered mobile platform, developed with residents and local government leaders, that enhances accountability in real estate development and urban planning when addressing the spatial justice of BIPOC communities in Jersey City.

RSVP today at the link in bio.

Join MFA DSI’s Thesis Show, May 12, to learn about Joie (Jieying) Du and Yona (Yuna) Yao’s project, AfterWags. AfterWags is an organization that teaches pet owners to upcycle household materials into pet play experiences, transforming passive consumers into circular creators and cultivating a sustainable pet-toy system.

RSVP today at the link in bio.

Join MFA DSI’s Thesis Show, May 12, to learn about Yajá Mulcare’s Maker’s Resistance. The Maker’s Resistance is an art and education collective working with the Sanitation Foundation to reduce social-media-driven overconsumption and materialistic behavior among Gen-Z young adults.

RSVP today at the link in bio.

Join MFA DSI’s Thesis Show, May 12, to hear from our keynote speaker, Tamika Abaka-Wood!

Tamika Abaka-Wood is a London-born, NYC-based cultural anthropologist, researcher, and social practice artist whose work sits at the intersection of human behavior, deep time humility, and collective futures. Through her independent business, Corner Booth, she co-conspires with many people to deliver ethnographic research, insight design, and cultural strategy across the globe. Tamika’s most alive project, Dial-An-Ancestor, is a techno-spiritual hotline and living, breathing, evolving archive; a multigenerational and collective work she is stewarding to live for 100 years. At its core, her work is about seeing things as they are, then as they could be at their most potent, soft and liberatory.

RSVP today at the link in bio.