ZOE MIYAKO LEE
zoemiyako@gmail.comare.nainstagram
Zoe Lee is a designer, entreprenuer, researcher, and filmmaker based in the United States. After receiving a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), she co-founded BEAM, a research-led creative studio and public imagination engine for people & planet.
She is also a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative and a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s design, culture, and tech incubator, in the Year 12 Creative Science cohort.
Her work focuses on how climate technologies and interventions operate once they move into real places—shaped by ecological conditions, governance, culture, and lived relationships to land and water. Her practice blends research, design, and storytelling to make complex socio-ecological systems legible and negotiable.
Her work has been published and presented internationally, and has appeared in Vox, MIT Technology Review, ArtNews, The Today Show, O! Magazine, Stereo Saints, and Barley Field Magazine.
CV
MAPPING RESILIENT PROVIDENCE
MAPPING RESILIENT PROVIDENCE
Toolbuilding & Design, Providence Resilience Project
Team: Annie Chen, Ryan Lettieri, Zoe Lee
Partners: Providence Resilience Project, Roots2Empower, Half-Full
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DESCRIPTION
In collaboration with the Providence Resilience Project, this work focused on designing participatory tools that enable communities to articulate lived experiences of climate risk. Through workshops and structured activities, residents contributed qualitative and spatial data on flooding, heat, and infrastructure vulnerability—information often missing from conventional resilience planning.
The tools translated community-generated knowledge into formats legible to engineers and planners, supporting analysis by firms such as Arcadis and informing reports for municipal agencies. By centering data collection within the community itself, the project demonstrates how resilience planning can be strengthened when lived experience is treated as critical infrastructure alongside technical models.