/About Sarah Filley is an artist, urban designer, writer and public speaker on urban innovation, creative placemaking and retail trends. Blending boosterism with positive deviance her interdisciplinary background serves as a foundation to bring design thinking to city scale.
She is the Cofounded of the award winning Popuphood launched in 2011 as a social enterprise. Popuphood is consulted to incubate small businesses and revitalizes neighborhoods, block by block. The successful pilot project in Old Oakland has received international press and is now being replicated in additional neighborhoods in Oakland and internationally.
Her slant towards participatory urbanism paved the way for civic engagement projects that bend technology in the service of wonder. Recent projects include Dragonfly at ybca, GOODbuildings and Wonderarium including +Succulent Circus, and the Mobile Plant Ambassador (with Yvette Molina).
/December popuphood launch in Old Oakland, CA RHoKdrop2drink.org launch, first place winner
*Social Innovator Series: Ways to design, develop and grow social
innovation, The Open Book of Social Innovation, Robin Murray, Julie
Caulier-Grice, Geoff Mulgan
/Bio
Filley studied Sculpture and Photography at California College of the Arts. She is a designer, artist, curator, and speaker, and writer. She is addicted to civic hackathons, succulents, and big ideas. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. She has designed and implemented science and art exhibitions for over a decade and has put this experience to work through cross sector partnerships for positive social impact with popuphood.
/Think Tanks Future. Soul.Think. Tank, SF YBCA The future of retail, MSFW, Melbourne, AU
/Residencies University of California Botanical Gardens at Berkeley (Berkeley, 2010) with Wonderarium. GAFFTA, goodbuildings.info (2011) Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, 2008)
/Instituions ybca Santa Clara Museum Seattle Art Museum California Academy of Science, University of California Botanical Gardens at Berkeley, Exploratorium, Chabot Science Center, the Oakland Museum of California, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), the Richmond Art Center, the Asian Art Museum, PAHMA at UC Berkeley, Mills College, and Zeum (select list)
