The Lavin Agency would like to welcome TED Senior Fellow Candy Chang as our newest speaker. A former New York Times art director, Chang is an artist who uses bright graphics in public spaces to help us rethink the contemporary city. Her work, profiled worldwide, aims to reanimate the physical surroundings of dilapidated neighborhoods while simultaneously generating a sense of community among residents. For her latest project, ”Before I Die…,” Chang turned a decaying house in her New Orleans neighborhood into a giant chalk board onto which people could complete this sentence: “Before I die, I want to…” The Atlantic called it "one of the most creative community projects ever.” Chang is also a featured expert in the new film Urbanized (trailer above--that's Candy at 1:05, applying a sticker from her "I Wish This Was..." project to an abandoned storefront window), about the future of cities. On stage, Candy Chang shares her vision and her passion with audiences the world over:

Combining urban planning, street art, and graphic design, Candy Chang transforms simple objects like stickers, stencils, and chalkboards into powerful tools that spark conversations in public spaces around the world. In her talks, she poses new strategies for civic life and inspires you to think differently about how you approach your own work. Through personal stories from her childhood to the present, she illustrates how seemingly disparate experiences in countries from Kazakhstan to South Africa to Finland have come together to incite new perspectives and form a coherent philosophy. Carefully crafted for each audience and cultivated from her own evolving questions, Candy's provocative and intimate talks explore the power of personal introspection in public space and what we can learn from our collective wisdom.