About us

Department of Public Imagination - a public art project - imagines and prototypes new infrastructure for imagination work in Boston. DPI’s activations invite folks to add to a living archive through an installation of the Dream Portal Phone Booth and live soundscape events which encourage collaborative envisioning, rest, and reflection.

Founded by Dzidzor Azaglo and crystal bi, Department of Public Imagination holds activations in Boston that make space for horizontal imagination work. Often our communities are reshaped by top-down design. Horizontal imagination work, by contrast, is a result of communities designing and imagining what they need based on deep local knowledge.

Dzidor Azaglo

Dzidzor (Jee-Jaw) is a Ga-Ewe folklore, performing artist, author and entrepreneur. Dzidzor’s style of call and response has reimagined poetry and story-telling as a way to include the audience in an experience to challenge, inspire, and encourage self beyond traditional forms. Dzidzor weaves her love for spoken word, storytelling, mixing and collaging sound within her performance.

Born in Italy, to Ghanaian parents and raised in North Carolina. She’s immersed herself in merging cultures from the South to Ghanaian culture. She’s a vessel chosen to deliver a message through writing, performance, and community organizing. Her performance art demystifies the role of an artist being watched and invites the audience to “perform” and be a part of the performance. Such as the Black Cotton Club and workshops that she facilitates. Dzidzor’s work is full of curiosity and questions surrounding the ideas of God, community and church, home, blackness, and identity.

crystal bi

Crystal Bi (she/they) is a queer, mixed race, Taiwanese American, multimedia artist working in the public realm. Her participatory art projects explore themes of imagination, creative archiving, and belonging. Her practice includes weaving sculptures with natural materials, collecting voice messages, and creating installations out of plexiglass.

As a public artist, professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Creative Engagement Consultant with Design Studio for Social Intervention, Crystal works with others to design interventions that imagine possible futures.

She is currently fulfilling a dream to build a Department of Public Imagination, which creates infrastructure for horizontal dream work in Boston.www.crystal-bi.com