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Rosten Woo

He // Him // His

Civic Designer

Los Angeles, California

A very cool looking wasian man with short hair wearing a yellow beanie and posed against an outdoor background that is slightly out of focus.

Photo by Helki Frantzen.

“My goal as an artist is to re-orient people, including myself, to the places we live. I believe in artwork as a non-coercive form of education.”

Rosten Woo is an artist, designer, writer, and educator living in Los Angeles. Woo makes things that help people understand complex systems, re-orient themselves to places, and participate in group decision-making.

He produces civic-scale artworks and works as a collaborator and consultant to a variety of grassroots and non-profit organizations. His work has been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Netherlands Architectural Institute, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and various piers, public housing developments, tugboats, shopping malls, and parks in New York and Los Angeles. His work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. He is co-founder and former executive director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a New York Based non-profit organization dedicated to using art and design to foster civic participation, winner of the 2016 National Design Award for institutional achievement. His book, Street Value, about race and retail urban development in Brooklyn, NY was published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Woo is a recent recipient of the Emerson Collective Fellowship, the Stanton Fellowship, and the Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities.

Donor -This award was generously supported by donors of the USA Fellowship Awards program.

This artist page was last updated on: 01.14.2026

Architecture & Design
An exhibition space holds a mini golf course. Each hole of the course focuses on a different aspect of zoning history including a wall length ramp that covers the entire back wall tracing the downward slope of a graph and a ladder that leads up to the top of the graph. A series of brightly colored buildings of different shapes and dimensions, and an enormous map of skid row.

The Back 9 by Rosten Woo, 2017. Installation and performance series about the history and implications of zoning in downtown Los Angeles with the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

Photo by Monica Nouwens.

A group of people sit on the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River at sunset listening to headphones. In the background, abundant vegetation breaks through the center of the river channel.

What Water Wants by Rosten Woo, 2024. A 30-minute audio piece set on the banks of the LA river that moves between a guided meditation and speculative disaster horror, evoking multiple perspectives of the river’s history and future as if flipping through sonified apertures.

Photo by Matthew Scott.

From behind, we see a black-haired mother and child standing side by side looking at an exhibition. The exhibition is composed of brightly colored pieces of paper with images of objects and stories about them. The papers hang from white hooks mounted on black pegboard.

Takachizu by Rosten Woo, 2018. Public event series, memory-mapping, and exhibition charting past and future of Little Tokyo for the Little Tokyo Service Center.

Photo by Rudy Espinoza.