Talks at the Commons: Artist, Author Jer Thorp

Pratt’s School of Design is excited to welcome Jer Thorp, an avid birder and naturalist who teaches about the overlap between nature, code, and community.
Jer Thorp is a Canadian-born artist, author, and educator, based in New York City, whose work fuses art, data, and human experience. With a background in genetics, Jer champions a “data systems” approach that emphasizes how collection, computation, and representation shape our understanding.

He served as the first Data Artist in Residence at The New York Times and later as Innovator-in-Residence at the Library of Congress. Among his notable projects, he designed the algorithm to arrange the names on the 9/11 Memorial in New York, ensuring relational clustering over alphabetical order.

He co‑founded The Office for Creative Research, earned recognition as a National Geographic Explorer, and was named one of Canada’s Greatest Explorers in 2015. His visual artworks have been showcased globally—from MoMA and Times Square to Ars Electronica and Seoul’s National Museum.

In 2021, Jer published his first book, Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future, exploring how we can reclaim agency in an increasingly quantified world. Today, he teaches at NYU’s coveted ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program), and continues advocating for ethical, creative, and human-centered data practices.
Talks at The Commons will amplify the practice and impact of design in both focused and expanded approaches to what it means to design. This is the second of three talks this fall; join us at Pfizer!