Lina Giraldo

Lina Maria Giraldo is a Colombian-born, Boston-based designer, interactive media artist, and storyteller with a Co-design, Civic Media, Art, and Technology background. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Data Visualization in the Journalism Department at Emerson College. Her work focuses on interactive storytelling for social change through data visualization, grassroots storytelling, public installations, and computer-generated work. Through the power of collective storytelling, including data literacy from a maker perspective, her work explores questions related to identity, data democratization, and environmental justice within minorities of color, mainly Latine.

Her achievements include being a Journalist in Residence at Emerson College, Artist in Residency for the City of Boston (Boston AIR 2.0), recipient of the Now + There accelerator program for creating Public Art at the City of Boston, the receiver of the Creative City Grant, the Hispanic Scholarship Foundation Grant, the Paul and Edith Babson Foundation grant, the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation Grant, and Faculty Advancement Fund Grant. 

Lina Maria Giraldo was a part of the award-winning educational website JFK50.org team while working as an Interaction Designer at ESI Design. My most notable interviewees for this project were Madeleine Albright, Stephen King, Harry Belafonte, and Nancy Pelosi. While doing my Master of Professional Studies in Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, She received the Paulette Goddard and Tisch School Scholarships. I was also awarded the Tsongas Scholarship at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her work has been covered in various media, including The Boston Globe, ABC News, The Artery, Artlink, WBUR, WGBH, and NPR.

Lina Maria Giraldo’s work delves into questions related to identity, data democratization, and environmental justice for minorities of color. In her last project, "Data Para Todes," She collaborated with first-generation Latine college students to collect, analyze, clean, and visualize data. Together, they developed a working prototype sensor to measure indoor air quality and used demographic data from the US census to understand geographic distributions and highlight inequalities in income between different racial groups. Lina Maria Giraldo was invited to speak about this project at the BARI conference hosted by Northeastern University at the MIT Media Lab. She was recently selected to participate in the book "Art as a Way of Listening." Her contribution to the book, "Identity, Technology, and Storytelling," focuses on changing the narrative of underserved communities of color by amplifying their voices through a maker's perspective and exploring their identity through an intergenerational cohort. The participants of this project learn critical skills such as coding, electronics, and interviewing as they work within their communities.