What if we treated our harbor like a place?
Team
Danielle Isadora Butler
Co-Founder
N.D. Austin
Co-Founder
Celeste LeCompte
Development Director
Danielle Isadora Butler is a designer, installation artist, and teacher, Her work focuses on creating opportunities for emotional connection to complex issues. She has designed and produced playgrounds that teach about cooperation, physical poetry archives that get you ready to listen, and creative residencies on boats in remote and challenging waterways. Danielle's skill for human-centered design pull from her previous work in restorative justice, arts education, and creative technology. Danielle believes that relationship building is the key to engaging people in issues that feel too large or abstract. As co-founder of the Tideland Institute Danielle is passionate about improving access to the water and expanding New Yorkers' relationship to their harbor through creative interventions.
N.D. Austin is the principal experience designer at Studio N.D. Austin, where for the past decade he’s made personalized immersive experiences designed to create powerful memories. With the Tideland Institute he’s led creative residencies on historic ships in Alaska and public boat-in concerts in New York Harbor. As co-founder of design firm Sextantworks he led expeditions to the Arctic Circle and the Brazilian rainforest, and organized many public workshops and masterclasses, from first-responder training to urban planning. N.D. has designed immersive experiences all over the world; in New York Harbor he led the creation of a pop-up art colony on a decommissioned Governor’s Island Ferry, guiding 40 artists through permitting with the DEC, DEP, and the Coast Guard. N.D.’s placemaking work has been featured extensively in the New Yorker and the New York Times, which said his work is proof that art is not dead in New York.
Celeste LeCompte is the VP of strategy and operations for ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative newsroom. As a journalist, researcher, and technologist, her work is focused on creating an informed, engaged public. A lifelong lover of waterways, she grew up monitoring water quality on the Sangamon River and Goose Creek in Illinois and has explored rivers and coastlines as a journalist and paddler across the United States, China, and Panama. Since 2012, she has helped organize lectures, events, and concerts on boats in San Francisco and New York City. As a member of the Gowanus Dredgers, she co-hosts the monthly Paddle-In Movie Nights and acts as the alternate Dredgers' representative on Gowanus CAG committee. She is a board member of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, and an adviser to MICRO, a Brooklyn-based startup building a fleet of tiny science museums.
Braintrust
Alex Julie
Charles Phillip
Elizabeth Hutton
George Ingalls
Jake Barton
Jenny Raymon
Matthew Rhys
Tali Wertheimer