Deanna Van Buren

The Mental Elf

Deanna Van Buren is an award-winning architect and activist recognized internationally for her leadership in using architecture, design, and real estate innovations to address the social inequities behind the mass incarceration crisis.

Van Buren is co-founder of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, an architecture and design firm with the mission of dismantling the punitive infrastructure of the prison system by designing and building new spaces informed by restorative justice: peacemaking centers, mobile re-entry housing, holistic behavioral health hubs, spaces for youth, spaces for diversion/re-entry, and more.

Her work has been recognized by the American Institute of Architects San Francisco, as well as Architectural Record’s Women in Architecture Awards honoring pioneering professionals. Van Buren is the only architect to have been awarded the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, was the 2018 recipient of the Berkeley-Rupp Prize and Professorship and is an alumna of the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

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