PARTICIPANTS

LEE DAVIS is an author, designer and social entrepreneur, and currently a Scholar-in-Residence in the Center for Social Design at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). He is co-Founder of NESsT, a pioneering incubator of social businesses solving critical social problems in emerging markets. Since 1997, NESsT has supported over 3,500 social enterprises across in Eastern Europe and Latin America, and was a 2004 winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. Lee served for 15 years as co-CEO, building NESsT into a global team of 50 with offices across 11 countries, and as Chief Innovation Officer (2012-2013), during which time he was curator of the 2012 Social Enterprise World Forum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Lee is a Social Enterprise Fellow at the Yale School of Management and was a Research Fellow and Lecturer in Social Change and Development at the Johns Hopkins Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is a former Program Officer in the Public Participation Program at the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe. He started his career as a designer with firms in New York, Connecticut, and Osaka, Japan, and was the first in-house designer for international relief and development agency CARE.

Lee holds an MA in Policy Studies from the Johns Hopkins University, and a BA in Studio Art from Connecticut College. He was a 1998-89 recipient of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to undertake an independent, yearlong, comparative ethnology of design in Japan and Switzerland.

Lee is a Board member of the Winterhouse Institute and the Haven Women’s Center, a Trustee of NESsT UK, and Chair of the Alumni Advisory Board of the Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts (CISLA) at Connecticut College.