Catherine D´Ignazio

Catherine D’Ignazio is a Professor of Urban Planning and Sciences in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT. She is also the director of the Data + Feminism Lab, which uses data and computational methods to work towards racial and gender equity, particularly in relation to space and place.

She is an academic, artist / designer, and “mom hacker” who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy, and civic engagement. She has led reproductive justice hackathons, designed global news recommendations systems, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and led visualizations of walking data to visualize the future of the sea level rise. With Rahul Bhargava, she created the Databasic.io platform, a set of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science. Her 2020 MIT Press book, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices.

Her research, at the intersection of technology, design, and social justice, has been published in the Journal of Peer Production, the Journal of Community Informatics, and Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI) proceedings. Her art and design projects have won awards from the Tanne Foundation, Turbulence.org, and the Knight Foundation, and were exhibited at the Venice Biennale and ICA Boston.