Zarith Pineda

Zarith Pineda is an architectural and urban designer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator whose work advances spatial justice through community-authored civic infrastructure. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Territorial Empathy, the first Latinx-founded community design organization in New York State. Established in 2018, Territorial Empathy operates at the intersection of architecture, public art, research, and policy, centering immigrants, women, children, and displaced communities within design processes historically shaped without them.

Her most recent project, H.earth, located at the Bruckner Mott Haven Community Garden in the South Bronx, positions the community garden as living civic infrastructure — a site where food sovereignty, environmental stewardship, cultural preservation, and immigrant self-determination converge. Developed in close collaboration with gardeners and neighborhood partners, the project reframes green space as an instrument of spatial justice. H.earth has been featured in Dwell (2025), Frame (2025), El País (2024), and The Architect’s Newspaper (2023), reflecting international recognition of her community-embedded design methodology.

Territorial Empathy was selected for re:Arc Institute’s prestigious Practice Lab, becoming the only U.S.-based organization awarded the distinction. The selection recognizes practices advancing non-extractive, justice-centered models of design globally and affirms Pineda’s leadership in redefining the ethics and structure of contemporary practice.

In 2021, Pineda led The People’s Bus, transforming a former Rikers Island transport bus into a mobile civic engagement platform for storytelling, healing, and public dialogue. The project reimagined an object of incarceration as a vehicle for collective memory and civic repair, foregrounding design as a tool for restorative justice. That same year, she served as a Research Fellow with the Non-Extractive Architecture project at the Venice Biennale, contributing to international discourse on labor, extraction, and design ethics.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Territorial Empathy produced spatial analyses documenting the disproportionate impact of the virus on Black and Latino communities in New York City, exposing the intersections of environmental racism, segregation, and infrastructural neglect. The practice also released free, open-source outdoor classroom prototypes to support the safe reopening of public schools, expanding the role of architects in emergency public health response.

Earlier work includes mapping the spatial consequences of the U.S. Family Separation policy at the U.S.–Mexico border and developing sustainable infrastructure proposals for Syrian and Venezuelan refugee communities. Across scales and geographies, Pineda frames design as a civic act — a mechanism for systems literacy, institutional accountability, and redistribution of authorship.

Pineda teaches at both Columbia GSAPP and The City College of New York (CUNY). Since 2016, she has led studios and seminars in urban design, digital techniques, and data visualization. Her pedagogy integrates narrative cartography, systems analysis, and collective authorship, encouraging students to situate design within structures of power while advancing new spatial imaginaries.

She holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University, a Master of Architecture from Tulane University, a Bachelor of Architecture from Tulane, and a Bachelor of Arts in French and Francophone Studies. She also completed architectural studies (Master Cycle I) at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris.

Through practice, research, and teaching, Pineda advances spatial justice not as a theoretical framework, but as a material, institutional, and cultural intervention.