Creative Research
A frequent writer and lecturer, Cowan has been a featured speaker at NYCxDesign; the Van Alen Institute, 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.
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.