Lafayette Cruise

Department: Arts & Culture
Email: [email protected]

Biography:

Lafayette Cruise is a Regional Arts & Culture Planner in MAPC’s Arts & Culture division, Lafayette brings experience as an urban planner, futurist, artist, and educator to his work of serving the health and vitality of the artists and culturemakers in the Boston region.

Lafayette’s work with MAPC is informed by diverse professional experience including the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, the Mayors’ Offices of New York City and Racine, Wisconsin, and his independent creative practice. He currently teaches in the Architecture Department of the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a founding member of the Guild of Future Architects, most recently serving as a member of its regenerative leadership team.

Lafayette worked as an artist and worldbuilder on an array of projects. His practice engages projects at the intersection of urban planning and speculative fiction. He leverages the radical imagination and world-building capabilities of speculative fiction and the multidisciplinary, strategic implementation tools of urban planning in order to imagine, plan, and build a more just, liberating, and sustainable future. He works across media including creative direction, facilitating, writing, collage, video, and installation. He was a member of NEWINC, the New Museum’s creative practice incubator, a creative resident with IDEO CoLab Ventures, and has shown work at LaMaMa Galleria and the MoMA.

Lafayette received his BS in Social Policy from Northwestern University and his Masters of City Planning from MIT. He holds an immense sense of awe and wonder for people, nature and the imaginative possibilities of how we can exist together that continues to inform his diverse professional practice.