Applied Imagination Fellow, 2021-2022
Panthea Lee is a strategist, organizer, designer, and facilitator working for structural justice and collective liberation, and the executive director of Reboot. She builds healing coalitions between communities, activists, movements, and institutions to dismantle inequity—and partners with artists to drive transformative change. Panthea is a pioneer in curating and guiding coalitions to tackle complex social challenges, and has done so in more than 30 countries. The global co-creation efforts she’s led have launched efforts to protect human rights defenders, tackle public corruption, strengthen democracy, advance knowledge equity, reform international agencies, and drive media innovation. In past lives, Panthea was a journalist, ethnographer, and cultural organizer. Her analyses have been featured in Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, CNN, Fast Company, the New York Times, MIT Innovation, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. She has lectured at Harvard, Columbia, and New York Universities. Panthea serves on the boards of The Laundromat Project, RSA (Royal Society of Arts) US, Development Gateway, and People Powered: The Global Hub for Participatory Democracy.
Panthea’s Applied Imagination Fellowship project, “The People’s Commission for Justice,” draws on healing justice, participatory art and deliberative democracy practices to engage Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in building nourishing visions of the future and creating both compelling public art projects and concrete plans for advocacy and social change.