Marisa Angell Brown is the Executive Director of Providence Preservation Society (PPS). She is an active speaker and writer on preservation history and practice, American architecture, and public art. Her writing has appeared in Places Journal, Perspecta, Manual, Buildings and Landscapes, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and her curatorial projects have been featured in Metropolis, Architectural Record, the Associated Press, the Providence Journal and the Public’s Radio. Brown has an article in the Spring 2023 Journal of Architectural Education’s Reparations! issue titled “Notes Toward a Critical Race Practice of Preservation.”
Brown teaches courses at the women’s prison in Rhode Island with College Unbound, and teaches graduate seminars in the departments of Interior Architecture, and Theory and History of Art and Design at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Before joining PPS in 2023, Brown was Associate Director of RISD’s Center for Complexity, and before that, served as Assistant Director at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, where she taught courses in preservation and the public humanities and directed community partnerships, public programs and research initiatives on placekeeping, spatial practice and public history.
Brown received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Yale University and has an MA from the University of Chicago and a BA from Princeton University. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and on the boards of Rhode Island State Council for the Arts and the Rhode Island State House Restoration Society. She is Korean-American and grew up in Dubai and New York.
| CV |