01 · Practice
I build systems-level initiatives through participatory research, community partnership, and sustained organizing work. My approach begins with the relationships, structures, histories, and distributions of power that shape a problem — not with a predetermined service or solution.
I developed this approach between 2013 and September 1, 2026, while serving as Creative Director and legal educator at NuLawLab, Northeastern University School of Law’s interdisciplinary innovation laboratory.
There, I built programs, research partnerships, courses, and civic infrastructures with communities, government agencies, legal organizations, artists, designers, faculty, and students. The work taught me that justice problems cannot be separated into isolated questions of law, service delivery, institutional procedure, or individual behavior.
They emerge through interactions among policies, technologies, organizations, relationships, cultural narratives, histories, and places. My practice examines how these elements reinforce one another, where power is concentrated, and what conditions enable communities to act.
A visible service problem is often produced by conditions elsewhere in the system. I examine relationships among institutions, policies, technologies, narratives, places, and forms of knowledge before defining an intervention.
Participation is not simply a research technique or a way to validate a proposal. It changes who defines the problem, whose knowledge matters, and who can shape what happens next.
Communities, institutions, researchers, artists, designers, and legal professionals understand different dimensions of a system. I create structures through which those forms of knowledge can inform collective inquiry and action.
A project should leave more than a report, event, or prototype. I look for what continues: relationships, knowledge, practices, platforms, organizational learning, and the capacity to respond after an intervention ends.
This approach builds collective legal capacity: the durable and distributed ability of people, relationships, organizations, and civic infrastructures to understand how law operates, circulate knowledge, recognize and name injustice, coordinate action, make collective claims, and change the systems affecting their lives.
Collective legal capacity does not reside in one person’s legal knowledge or ability to navigate a procedure. It is held across a community — in trusted relationships, shared practices, cultural knowledge, organizational networks, and spaces for learning and action.
It grows when communities shape the questions, knowledge moves between people, and the capacity to respond does not disappear when a project or funding period ends.
What knowledge can people continue to use?
Which relationships and practices remain?
Who can act differently because the work happened?
What capacity survives the end of the project?
In 2009 I completed an MFA in Public Practice at Otis College of Art and Design, in the program founded and chaired by Suzanne Lacy — the feminist artist who coined the term “new genre public art” and edited Mapping the Terrain, the field’s founding text. The program trained artists to work in communities, across disciplines, in public, with community participants holding substantive authorship. Los Angeles was the primary site, but the world was the campus: the first-year project always resulted in a public work, always situated in a specific community and its specific conditions.
As part of the program we traveled to New Orleans in 2007–2008 and worked with Transforma Projects — the collective of artists and community practitioners founded after Hurricane Katrina by Rick Lowe, Sam Durant, Jessica Cusick, and Robert Ruello to expand the role of artists in the rebuilding of the city. Lowe was also a faculty member and lead artist on the Otis program, which is how that connection was made. Two years after the storm, the city was still in crisis — infrastructure unmade, communities displaced, institutions that had failed people still in place. Working there, with a collective operating within those specific conditions, was not a field trip. It was a formation in what it actually means to practice in a place that has been systematically abandoned.
That formation sits underneath everything that came after. The community organizing in Vancouver. The public art commissions in Bristol, Sydney, New York, Santa Ana. And then, in 2013, a law school.
When I arrived at a law school in 2013, the questions I brought from this lineage remained consistent: who defines the problem? Who authors the process? Whose knowledge shapes the intervention? How is power redistributed? What survives after the project ends?
Those questions organized my work at NuLawLab and continue to organize my independent practice.
The MFA in Public Practice was the only accredited program in California dedicated exclusively to preparing artists for the public sphere. Lacy founded it in 2007, drawing on her own practice — the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman’s Building, large-scale community performances across the US and UK, the Oakland Projects — and on the tradition of socially engaged art she helped name. Studio facilities were at the 18th Street Art Center in Culver City. Students designed individual learning plans, worked across disciplines, and regularly traveled as part of the curriculum.
Transforma was a collective of artists and creative professionals formed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to support artists working in public in New Orleans, with a focus on the role of art and culture in addressing social and political needs around education, health, the environment, and community development. Co-founded by Rick Lowe, who also led first-year projects at Otis. That overlap — the same practitioners, the same questions, different cities — is where the method got tested.
If this approach could support your institution, community, or research program, I welcome a conversation.
Jules Rochielle Sievert