BIO
Sloan Leo Cowan (they/he) is a community designer, facilitator, educator and artist. They are a leading thinker in community design, or facilitation design—the art of helping people work better together.
To Cowan, design is a way of orienting toward creating change, and he creates strategies and practices to find shared language and frameworks that allow organizations to be more intentional about community design, strategy and engagement. To that end, he founded FLOX Studio Inc, a community design and strategy studio that supports mission-driven organizations to animate the practice of their values, where he serves as CEO & Lead Facilitator. Rooted in Black feminist theory, Afrofuturism, and social justice, FLOX engages social impact leaders to collaboratively design their culture, strategy, and organizational development efforts. Under Cowan’s leadership, FLOX Studio’s partnerships include The New School, Movement Voter Project, Wikimedia Foundation, the Ms. Foundation For Women, The New York Women’s Foundation, National Institute for Reproductive Health, The Opportunity Agenda, Fondation CHANEL, Women’s Donor Network, the YMCA of the USA, and others.
Cowan’s commitment to community and social justice was nurtured by early mentorship from feminist luminaries Barbara Smith and Naomi Jaffe. This grounded their practice in community facilitation methodologies, which they have used to support groups ranging from The Audre Lorde Project to Resource Generation.
In January 2020 Cowan was named the inaugural Designer-in-Residence at the School of Visual Arts Design for Social Innovation program, where they developed and launched Community Design for Leaders (CDL), a learning lab for design practitioners looking to orient their practice towards mutuality and justice. Cowan served as an adjunct professor of nonprofit management at NYU Wagner’s Graduate School of Public Service for seven years and teaches occasionally at The New School and the School of Visual Arts, in their Design for Social Innovation and Products of Design programs.
A frequent writer and lecturer, Cowan has been a featured speaker at NYCxDesign; the Design Trust for Public Space; Design For America; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; and The New School’s Parsons School of Design. He has also appeared as a guest on NYCxDesign’s Mic podcast, Revision Path with Maurice Cherry, and The Human Centered Design Podcast.. They were the keynote speaker for the School of Visual Arts’s 2021 Art & Activism symposium.
Cowan is a Forbes contributor whose writing explores facilitation, organizational development, and community design. Their essay “The Infrastructure of Care: Community Design, Healing & Organizational Post Traumatic Growth” was published in the 2022 anthology The Black Experience in Design, which spotlights teaching practices, research, stories, and conversations from a Black/African diasporic lens. Their chapter “Queering service design: toward a truly human-centered design orientation,” written in collaboration with Miya Osaki and Mari Nakano, is forthcoming in a new service design handbook edited by Lara Penin.
A proud graduate of the University at Albany, Cowan has over 15 years of experience facilitating and managing social impact staff & volunteer teams. In their early career as a relationship management strategist in the nonprofit sector, they raised $20M for a wide range of organizations advancing LGBTQI human rights globally, supporting formerly incarcerated individuals, and housing youth. They later served as the Director of Board Relations for the Environmental Defense Fund and the Chief of Staff for the Trust for Public Land, where they facilitated the development of the 2020–2025 strategic plan “The Power of Land For People.”
As an artist, they were awarded a 2020 Queer.Archive.Work residency, where they produced QUEERBOOK, a community-sourced artbook archiving stories of queer community building in the era of COVID-19 and America’s great reckoning. Their 2020 mixed-media installation “A Watermelon for Leo”, was presented at Pen + Brush Gallery (NYC) and reviewed in Whitewall magazine.
Cowan formerly served as the Board of Directors’ Governance Chair for the Ms. Foundation For Women, the Echoing Green Fellowship evaluator, and the Core77 Design Awards Social Impact Jury Captain. He most recently served on the board of the Design Trust for Public Space until February 2024.
Connect with them 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 printmaking, their frankly political work invites the audience to confront and grapple with their own values, commitments, and sense of belonging. sloan leo’s work subtly and explicitly pushes against binary understandings of race and gender. By manipulating and excavating layers of material and meaning, sloan leo publicly exhibits an intimate and profoundly personal revelatory journey.
*Photo by Wenting Gu (2021)