"let's create healing experiences."

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Teri Kwant is the founder of DreamLab  a humanity-centered experience design collaborative. She has led more than 30 years of insightful research, meaningful and beautiful design – work that resides in public and private realms, from hospitals to museums and in parks and city centers. Throughout this design life she has had the honor of working alongside open hearted people who augment, disrupt and enhance her work. Teri and her experience design collaborator Kate  curate and lead smart, talented teams and create meaning through story and deep connection.

As an accomplished experience designer, researcher, and public artist, Teri Kwant has designed public engagement at the scale of cities to inform urban design and has created placemaking and public art projects at the intimate scale of human interaction. She has been a professional lecturer in the design of experience, environments, and communications for the University of Minnesota School of Design and Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She has taught Human Centered Design for Well-Being with a social and racial justice lens as an architectural studio in the BDA program at the University of Minnesota's School of Design, Research and Society, and Programming and Society, both architectural studios at Dunwoody College. In addition she has taught graphic design at both institutions.

A specialist in the design of inclusive places for diverse populations, she led award-winning teams for the Sandy Hook Memorial and for the design of the third children's hospice in the country, located in Minnesota. A current published author on the topic of Trauma Informed Placemaking and Design for Resiliency, she has presented at the AIA conference leading an interactive session on how design can be a factor and a force for change in the arenas of mental health and well-being, and for the ASLA an educational workshop on transforming placemaking into place-healing. in both the workplace, and in public space. Kwant describes herself as a designer, artist, educator/advocate, and mom, not necessarily in that order. 

In practice, Teri is one part design thinker, two parts design doer, with the heart of a research geek. Endlessly curious about the role of design in our human journey and how our conversations can inspire new ways of thinking, designing, and doing. Teri believes that beauty, inclusive design, and artful conversations can create healing. Her purpose is to help create spaces for those conversations to happen.