Home is a Human Right media series: rebranding homelessness

Concept, creative direction, content

Home is a Human Right is a media series about homes, wealth, and racial inequity, produced in collaboration with homeless and housed artists and activists in New York City in the 2020 pandemic. If homelessness in the United States is portrayed in the media at all, it tends to be represented as a state of being outside of human experience— a dehumanized identity existing independently of any economic factors that may have caused it. In New York City, homelessness is a common reality hiding a stark racial inequity: 100,000 New Yorkers live in the shelter system, nearly 90% of whom self-identify as Black or Brown.

Recognizing this state of invisibility from my experience of growing up queer in the ’80s, and inspired by the homeless rights activists fighting housing inequity in New York in the early 2020's, I initiated a media project sharing the wisdom and perspective homeless New Yorkers.

The series began during quarantine as a curation of biweekly zoom conversations featuring people with direct experience of being homeless, many of whom have been dedicated advocates in the homeless rights movement. It developed into a social media feed, with bite-sized views into the lives of those who have lived without a home: a formerly homeless young man offers a cooking tutorial in his new apartment and talks about what it’s like eating in the shelter, an advocate who has finally gotten a place hosts a design-challenge makeover with the help of our allies The Moving Support Project, turning his empty apartment into a place to really call home.