Shalini Agrawal

Connector & Collaborator

Shalini Agrawal is an interdisciplinarian informed by the diversity of her roles as architect, designer, facilitator, teacher and mother. She brings over 25 years of hands-on experience in community-engaged practice in design and architecture. She is Director of Programs for Open Architecture Collaborative, and directs Pathways to Equity, a design leadership program for social equity. Pathways to Equity was a recipient of the 2020 NOMA NAACP SEED Award for Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

Shalini’s teaches at the intersection of creative practice and community engagement, and her research focuses on revealing the historical legacies of colonization in architecture and design and its lasting impacts. She does this in her role as Associate Professor in Critical Ethnic Studies, Interdisciplinary Studio, Individualized and the Decolonial School at California College of the Arts. She is the Visiting Faculty Fellow in Spatial Justice at the School of Architecture & Environment at University of Oregon. She is a core organizer for Dark Matter U, a national network of BIPOC educators who challenge, inform, and reshape architecture education towards anti-racism. 

Shalini a contributing author to Design for Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity and Public Interest Design Education Guidebook, and is the recipient of 2019 AIA San Francisco’s Community Alliance Award for Education.

"How can we slow down, pause, and notice what’s missing?”

Diversity in Leadership

Paving a New Path

When faced with a shortage of leadership opportunities for women of color over 25 years ago, Shalini's response was not to “wait my turn”, but to create the opportunities herself. She co-founded the non-profit architreasures in 1996, an organization that works in underrepresented communities, primarily communities of color, employing participatory design for the design of public space. Her investment in every aspect of the organization - curriculum development, fundraising, board member, workshop facilitation - profoundly influenced the trajectory of her leadership journey, and sparked her decades-long community design practice that engages with communities, non-profit organizations, government entities and academic institutions.

As a self-taught public interest designer, Shalini saw a pressing need to develop best practices and assert the value of this design process. Her commitment to share this practice continued at the Center for Art + Public Life at California College of the Arts. As director, she created curriculum for students to learn with communities through fellowships, grants, classes and social impact projects. In addition, she took seriously the responsibility to prepare students in community-engaged practice before engaging with communities, and co-developed workshops that have been requested nationally. Read about Shalini's work.