Author, designer, and social entrepreneur.
Creative, strategic, and visionary founder and leader with three decades of executive-level experience in academia, social design, social enterprise, philanthropy, and impact investing.
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Lee Davis is the co-founder and Co-Executive Director of the Center for Creative Impact at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), dedicated to leveraging the power of creativity to tackle social and ecological challenges.
Lee is also co-founder and former co-CEO of NESsT that has invested over $40 million in social enterprises across Latin America and Eastern Europe. For his pioneering work at NESsT, he was a 2004 recipient of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and was appointed a Social Enterprise Fellow at the Yale School of Management | Program on Social Enterprise.
Lee is co-chair of the board of the Winterhouse Institute, a national community of practice for social design educators.
In 2019, Lee was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in London. He is also a recipient of the prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.
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University of Edinburgh – PhD, Design (candidate): My research explores the complexity of ‘more-than-human’ design and aims to imagine a new paradigm for design in a multi-species world.
Johns Hopkins University – MA, Public Policy
Connecticut College – BA, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa; Distinction in Major Field.
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Coming soon!
Recent work
gallery alley
gallery alley transforms a neglected Baltimore City alley into an open-air cultural and green space celebrating art and ecology.
Designing Peace
“Universality Through Visual Symbols” essay in Designing Peace: Building a Better Future Now (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, June 2022)
Please reach out, I’d love to hear from you!