Shannon Scrofano is a Los Angeles-based designer whose work includes interdisciplinary performance, public space, exhibition, curation and dialogue projects internationally and throughout the US. She collaborates with communities, organizations and other artists to explore location-based design process, practice and conditions.
Her work has been seen at venues including the Berlinale, the National Cultural Center in Kampala, PICA’s TBA, the Getty Villa, REDCAT, El Teatro Público in Havana, the Prague Quadrennial, the Mistake Room, the Skirball Cultural Center, the Ostrava Festival, SF MOMA, and the Tribeca Film Festival, as well as in city halls, car dealerships, warehouses, desert expanses, under bridges, on rooftops and on an elk ranch, and has been supported by organizations including ArtPlace, National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, Creative Capital Map Fund, the Surdna Foundation, TCG’s AHA, and the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
She serves as the Director of Design for the Center for Performance and Civic Practice, developing field-building tools and strategies for artists and designers to collaborate cross-sector within communities and organizations to build civic health, equity and capacity. She also serves as Co-Artistic Director of Nuestro Lugar : North Shore, the first major resident-designed, culture-driven, community development project in a rural community on the Salton Sea, in partnership with Kounkuey Design Initiative and Mutuo Architecture, and part of an upcoming exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.
In addition, she is a member of the first arts and capacity-building working group of the Kettering Foundation, focused on improving democratic practices on a national scale and generating new research around the intersections of arts and civic work. She has been a guest/visiting faculty at institutions including Brown University, Duke University, Northwestern, Georgetown, CalState, and at festivals and conferences including the Prague Quadrennial, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and the University of Goldsmiths in London. She was recently named to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ 2016 YBCA100, an annual list of “the creative minds that are asking the questions and making the provocations that will shape the future of culture.” She teaches design at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).
She has had the privilege of collaborating with artists and curators including Animating Democracy, Anne Basting, Torry Bend, Sandra Burns, Rachel Chavkin, Cloud Eye Control, Efren Delgadillo, Lue Douthit, Kristy Edmunds, Erik Ehn, Larissa Fasthorse, Peter Flaherty, Michael John Garcés, Nataki Garrett, Janie Geiser, Grand Lady Dance House, Steph Green, Sean Griffin, Alison Heimstead, Andy Horwitz, Liam Kaas-Lentz, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, Geoff Korf, Shishir Kurup, Sage and Aleigh Lewis, Aubree Lynn, Ellen McCartney, Emily Mendelsohn, Daniel Morando, Jules Odendahl-James, Manolo Orjuela, Michael Premo and Rachel Falcone, Michael Rohd, Alison Russo, David Sabel, Evelyn Serrano, Studio Unlisted, TENT, Maureen Towey, Alice Tuan, Miranda Wright, Jeanette Yew, and many others.