Biography /
Melissa Mongiat

While embracing opportunities that new media offer, Melissa Mongiat’s approach focuses on participation and narratives. Her projects enable the public to live stories that are relevant to them and have an enduring effect.

She is best known for her work on a series of public interactive installations created for London’s Royal Festival Hall, which led to her selection by Wallpaper magazine in 2007 as one of the world’s ten breakthrough designers.

In Montréal, The Good Conspiracy, a multi-platform project she created while creative director at Amuse, was presented at the Biennale 2009. This year, she was awarded the Design Montréal Phyllis Lambert grant with associate Mouna Andraos.

Melissa Mongiat is also known for her research work on participatory design created in collaboration with Kelsey Snook. The results have been presented notably at the Royal College of Art in London, the Banff New Media Institute and the Instituto di Diseno Europeo in Barcelona, as workshops and conferences, and led to the creation of goodparticipation.com. She is also a founding member of Like People Do, a team formerly based at Innovation Central Saint Martins in London, with whom she collaborated on a £1M research project with Arup Foresight.

In November 2010, Melissa Mongiat represented Montréal at the conference 'Design and mobility in the creative city', part of the Design Biennale in Saint-Étienne, France.

Melissa Mongiat holds a BA in Graphic Design from the Université du Québec à Montréal and an MA with distinction in Creative Practice for Narrative Environments from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She continues to visit both institutions as lecturer or teacher.