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Andrew Freiband is an artist, filmmaker, educator, producer, and research-artist. His praxis sits among the many intersections of art, education, media, film, journalism, literature, social impact, international development, research, and strategic design.

For over 20 years he worked as: a producer of award-winning and nationally broadcast documentary films, a multimedia artist, writer, publisher, social researcher, and arts educator at institutions including RISD, Pratt, and SVA. After years of mobilizing artists to engage in their historical moment in ways beyond activism or advocacy, he founded the Artists’ Literacies Institute in 2018 to serve as a supplement to the education of citizen-artists. The ALI seeks to discover new, more meaningful roles for artists in their society and communities that go beyond communications.

His creative practice consists of field-building around artists-as-researchers. As the ‘Artists’ Literacies Institute’ he’s convened professional development courses for artists in systems thinking, worked as a strategic designer for fine artists with social change ambitions, consulted and convened on interdisciplinary research with Cornell University and the United Nations among others, and produced arts-based ‘civic interventions’ on a national and global scale, including The Democratic Field with NYU’s Verbatim Performance Lab, the Artists’ Grief Deck with the NYC Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, and the Turn it Around! climate education project with UNESCO and the Open Society Foundations.