Cassandra Troyan is a writer, artist, designer, and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Design at Linnaeus University (LNU) in Sweden. They hold an MFA in Visual Arts (2012) from the University of Chicago, and since 2017 until 2024, they were one the inaugural Co-Directors of Visual Communication + Change; a programme exploring art and design’s role in fostering sustainable socio-ecological transformation, where they taught theory, practice, and creative-critical writing. Their current research investigates the relationship between green innovation and carceral surveillance technologies through artistic, collaborative and practice-based research methods. This work is grounded in over a decade of working with community-led responses and approaches to gendered violence, policing, sex worker rights, land defence, and mutual aid.
Much of their practice within recent years takes the form of co-creating spaces for collaborative processes or political interventions through abolitionist methods in projects such as, The Anti-Menagerie (2021–Ongoing), In the mouth of the polar bear (Fundacio Foto Colectania, Barcelona, 2021); GROUNDINGS (Linnaeus University, Sweden, 2022); and Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practice (punctum books, 2022). Individually, they are the author of several books of multi-genre works, wherein they explore how carcerality functions as a mechanism for control between the state, communities, and their collective forms of resistance, in, A Theory in Tears (2016), Freedom & Prostitution (2020), and Against Capture (2022). Cassandra is currently a doctoral researcher in the SNSF-funded project Infrastructural rehearsals: creative responses to the green and digital transition (2024–2028), a PhD candidate at the University of Westminster in The Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) and an associated PhD researcher in the MAKE/SENSE programme at Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW.
