Brettany Shannon, MPL, is a doctoral student in urban planning and development at the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. Her work delves into how artistic interventions in the city, particularly those articulating media arts and digital technologies, can foster community engagement and social justice. She believes media arts hold promise in that they engage with such planning phenomena as identity, participation, process, "time-place," or the nature and characteristics of a specific place at a particular time, and uphold context as a decisive factor in all. But just as we extol the virtues of the information age, she argues planners must not forget those on the other side of the digital divide, and so shape participatory processes accordingly. To that end, she studies community planning, the cultural economy, cultural landscapes, digital media, media arts, public space, the public realm, and comparative urbanism. She has undergraduate degrees in sociology and psychology from Vanderbilt University, which she used in her years as an arts fundraiser prior to returning to academia.

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