Catherine D'Ignazio is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also Director of the Data + Feminism Lab which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial justice, particularly as they relate to space and place. Her 2020 book from MIT Press, «Data Feminism», co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices and became an central reference for critical data visualization strategies within the humanities and the arts. D'Ignazio's second book, «Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action» (MIT Press 2024), highlights how mainstream data science can learn a lot from the care and memory work of grassroots feminist activists across the Americas. Her research at the intersection of technology, design & social justice has been published in FAccT, the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Big Data & Society, and the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI). Her art and design projects have won awards from the Tanne Foundation, Turbulence.org and the Knight Foundation and exhibited at the Venice Biennial and the ICA Boston.
