Catherine D’Ignazio

Catherine D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer, and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy, and civic engagement.

She has run reproductive justice hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. With Rahul Bhargava, she built the platform Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science.

Her 2020 book from MIT Press, “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 the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI). Her art and design projects have won awards from the Tanne Foundation, Turbulence.org, and the Knight Foundation, and have been exhibited at the Venice Biennial and the ICA Boston.

D’Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also Director of the Data + Feminism Lab, which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial equity, particularly in relation to space and place.