Melissa Fisher Ph.D., a cultural anthropologist, is on the faculty of Parsons School of Design at the New School, and is a Senior Advisor focused on workplace culture and design at CFAR Consulting and Coaching Services. She is also a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. Melissa has extensive experience ethnographically studying, writing, and consulting on gender, class, race, work, space, power, and the built environment. Her book in progress explores how architects and other professionals imagine and design post-covid work environments with a focus on equity and justice. Her work has been showcased in her books, Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Duke University Press) and Wall Street Women (Duke University Press), articles, white papers, media appearances, keynote speeches, and consulting on several films. She has held full-time faculty positions at New York University, Georgetown University, and was most recently the Laurits Andersen Professor of Business and Organizational Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Prior to becoming an anthropologist, Melissa worked in and on postmodern dance, performance, and graphic design in NYC as a master’s student at Wesleyan University. These experiences trained her to think about ways of connecting people, place, movement, and design.
