BIO
Sloan Leo Cowan (they/he) is a community designer, facilitator, and educator.
They are the founder, CEO & Lead Facilitator at FLOX Studio Inc, a community design and strategy studio that supports mission-driven organizations to animate the practice of their values.
Every day FLOX works to put community back in design. Using facilitation FLOX engages social impact leaders to collaboratively design their culture, strategy, and organizational development efforts. Rooted in black feminist theory, Afrofuturism, and social justice FLOX is on a mission to improve the embodied experience of social impact workers and the institutional communities that they comprise.
Under Sloan Leo’s leadership, FLOX Studio’s partnerships include The New School, The Movement Voter Project, The Wikimedia Foundation, The Ms. Foundation For Women, The New York Women’s Foundation, The National Institute for Reproductive Health, The Opportunity Agenda, and others.
In January 2020 they were appointed as the inaugural Designer-in-Residence at the School of Visual Arts Design for Social Innovation Master’s program where they developed and launched, Community Design for Leaders (CDL). Offered on a quarterly and on-demand basis, CDL is a learning lab for design practitioners looking to orient their practice towards mutuality and justice in Summer 2021. For seven years he was an adjunct professor of non-profit management at NYU Wagner’s Graduate School of Public Service and now serves as adjunct faculty on occasion at The New School, The School of Visual Arts (SVA) Design for Social Innovation Master’s Program, and SVA’s Products of Design Program.
A frequent speaker and writer, Sloan Leo’s been featured at various programs hosted by NYCxDesign, The Design Trust for Public Space, Design For America, The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and The New School’s School of Design Strategies and Management. He’s been a guest on Debbie Millman and NYCxDesign’s podcast, The Mic, Revision Path with Maurice Cherry, and frequently collaborates with Kelly Ann McKercher, author of Beyond Sticky Notes: Co-design for Everyone. In fall 2021, they were the keynote speaker for the 2021 Art & Activism symposium hosted by The School of Visual Arts Continuing Education program.
Sloan Leo is a current Forbes.com contributor, whose writing has also been featured in The Journal of Governmental Finance and Public Policy, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, and The European Business Review. In February 2022, their essay, “The Infrastructure of Care: Community Design, Healing & Organizational Post Traumatic Growth, was published in the anthology, The Black Experience in Design, which spotlights teaching practices, research, stories, and conversations from a Black/African diasporic lens. Leo’s newest work, which will be published in a new service design handbook in 2023 explores what it means to queer the practice of design, the chapter is a collaboration between Leo, Miya Osaki, and Mari Nakano.
A proud graduate of the University at Albany, Sloan Leo’s commitment to community and social justice was nurtured by early mentorship from feminists luminaries, Barbara Smith, and Naomi Jaffe. This has rooted their practice in community facilitation methodologies informed by their experiences with groups ranging from The Audre Lorde Project to Resource Generation.
He has over 15 years of experience facilitating and managing social impact staff & volunteer teams. Their early career was as a relationship management strategist working within the non-profit sector where they raised $20M for a wide range of organizations. Including the world’s only international LGBTQ+ human rights foundation, direct service organizations focused on housing for formerly incarcerated individuals and runaway and homeless youth, and Dream Corps, a social justice impact accelerator founded by Van Jones. They then went on to specialize in non-profit board engagement and operations, as the Director of Board Relations for the Environmental Defense Fund, where they managed the boards of EDF, EDFAction, EDF Europe, and EDF China. Subsequently joining the Trust for Public Land as the Chief of Staff, where they facilitated the development of the 2020-2025 strategic plan, “The Power of Land For People”.
As an artist, they were awarded a September 2020 Queer.Archive.Work residency, where they produced QUEERBOOK, a small batch RISO printed, community-sourced artbook, that creatively archived stories of queer community building in the era of COVID19 and America’s great reckoning. In winter 2020, their mixed media installation, “A Watermelon for Leo”, was on view at Pen & Brush Gallery (NY, NY) and received coverage in Whitewall Magazine. Leo has shown work at Darkroom Detroit, Queer.Archive.Work and Pen & Brush Gallery (NYC).
Formerly the Board of Directors, Governance Chair for The Ms. Foundation For Women, Echoing Green Climate Fellowship evaluator and was the 2021 Core77 Design Awards, Social Impact Jury Captain. Today, Sloan serves on the board of The Design Trust for Public Space.
Sloan Leo can be found on LinkedIn or at info@floxstudio.com.
ARTIST STATEMENT
sloan leo cowan’s work is decidedly queer, unambiguously black, and compassionately collective. Theirs is a social practice, that embeds them in the dynamics, evolution, and beautifully fraught realities of finding, nurturing, and navigating community. Through facilitation, dialogic pedagogy, digital video, photography, and printing, their work is frankly political and invites the audience to confront and grapple with their own sense of belonging, values, and commitments. leo’s work subtly and explicitly pushes against binary understandings of race and gender. By manipulating and excavating layers of material and meaning Leo’s work is a public exhibition of an intimate and profoundly personal, revelatory journey.
*Photo by Wenting Gu (2021)