Sloan Leo Cowan (they/he) is a community designer, facilitator, educator, and artist whose work sits at the intersection of queering design, solidarity economy, and collective liberation. A leading thinker in community and facilitation design, Sloan Leo sees design as more than problem-solving—it is an act of orientation toward change, a practice of reshaping the conditions that allow people to live, work, and thrive together.

As Founder of FLOX Studio, Sloan Leo partners with philanthropic, cultural, and social impact institutions to seed practices that move us beyond extractive systems and toward solidarity-based, democratic, and regenerative economies.Central to their practice is the idea of queering design—disrupting dominant norms of power, productivity, and hierarchy, while inviting expansive understandings of identity, relationship, and possibility. Through queering design, they are working to shift design away from extraction and toward practices that sustain community care and interdependence.

An artist as well as a strategist, Sloan Leo’s work is decidedly queer, unapologetically Black, and compassionately collective. Using facilitation, dialogic pedagogy, digital video, photography, and printmaking, their social practice invites participants and audiences alike to grapple with values, belonging, and the beautifully fraught realities of community life.

They split their time between Brooklyn, NY and Philadelphia, PA.