Panthea Lee

Panthea Lee is a strategist, curator, facilitator, and mediator working for structural justice and collective liberation. She builds and supports coalitions of community leaders, artists, healers, activists, and institutions to win dignity and joy for all. Panthea currently serves as the Executive Director of Reboot, and as a fellow at the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab and at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and Imagination. She is a pioneer in guiding diverse coalitions to tackle complex social challenges, with experience doing so in over 30 countries with partners including UNDP, CIVICUS, Wikimedia, MacArthur Foundation, the City of New York, as well as civil society groups and governments from local to federal. The global co-creation initiatives she’s led have launched new efforts to protect human rights activists, tackle corruption, strengthen democracy, advance knowledge equity, reform international agencies, and drive media innovation. In past lives, Panthea has been a journalist, ethnographer, and cultural organizer. Her work and analyses have been featured in Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, CNN, Fast Company, New York Times, MIT Innovation, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. She has lectured at universities including Harvard, Columbia, NYU, and School of Visual Arts. Panthea is an advisor to the World Economic Forum Partnering with Civil Society Initiative, the OECD Network on Innovative Citizen Participation, and Future of Good, and serves on the boards of The Laundromat Project, RSA (Royal Society of Arts) US, and People Powered: The Global Hub for Participatory Democracy.

Fellowship Impact

Panthea’s project, The Healing Justice Collaborative, explores the impacts of unaddressed trauma on our societies, pathways to collective healing that center structural equity and justice, and how the realms of public policy, international development, and global governance can learn from practices in the arts, healing justice, and conflict transformation. Through research, programming, and advocacy, The Healing Justice Collaborative seeks to bring together communities, artists, healers, mediators, and policymakers in exercises of radical co-creation to imagine bold alternative futures, design viable paths forward, and enact courageous proposals for change.

“I’ve been examining the role of art and culture as spaces to create these communal healing experiences. Art, at its best, can create spaces where we temporarily suspend reality, subvert existing orders, and practice new ways of being.”

Products Developed During Fellowship

New Positions and Appointments