Damon Rich is a designer and artist, and currently serves as the Urban Designer and Waterfront Planner for the City of Newark, New Jersey. His design work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Storefront for Art and Architecture and SculptureCenter (New York City), the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (Liepzig), Netherlands Architecture Institute (Rotterdam), and the 2008 Venice Biennale. In 1997, he founded the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people understand and change the places they live, where he served as Creative Director for 10 years. Damon has taught architecture and planning courses at the Cooper Union, the Pratt Institute, and the Parsons School of Design. He writes about architecture and politics for publications including the Village Voice, the Nation, Metropolis, and Architecture magazine. Damon has been awarded a New York State Council on the Arts award for his work with adult literacy and architecture, as well as a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony for his work on the history of urban renewal. In 2007, Damon was selected as a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an Artist-in-Residence at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where he developed a exhibition on architecture, real estate, and finance.