jen chantrtanapichate

Jen Chantrtanapichate is an artist, community arts facilitator and climate justice activist from New York City. She has received formal arts training from Goucher College and the Tufts School of the Museum of Fine Arts.  She has a Masters in Urban Planning from Hunter College's Department of Urban Planning and Policy and did her B.A. in Urban Studies. Jen is a painter and jeweler, having shared work internationally and in NYC. She has done art residencies at Casa Na Ilha on the island of Ilhabela in Sao Paulo, Brazil and in Puy-l'Évêque in the south of France.  She shares her jewelry arts via her Brooklyn based jewelry company, Crystal Chimera which she launched to support herself through grad school.  Active in her community, in May 2015, she founded the grassroots community organization, Cleanup North Brooklyn, which advocates for environmental justice, particularly in response to waste inequity. Since 2019, she has been organizing against a brand new fossil fuel pipeline that is primarily running through BIPOC communities in North Brooklyn. Back in 2012, she co-founded a community arts program at the Sixth Street Community Center in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As the current Program Director of SSCC, she is responsible for the overall success of their thriving community based programs.   

After years of experiencing the inequality of arts access and education for NYC youth and adults, she is motivated to make art spaces accessible and inclusive for all.  The youth program at SSCC is an arts, creative writing, wellness and urban sustainability program. Roughly 90% of the youth that attend receive some form of financial aid and program fees are determined on a sliding scale based on income.  Her arts work with young people explore a range including but not limited to: drawing, painting, textile design, printmaking, sculpture and creative writing. Her investment in urban sustainability and environmental justice has fueled her to develop a regular exposure for inner city youth to urban agriculture through regular urban farming workshops at a local rooftop garden on top of the Earth School. As a way to integrate Sixth Street Community Center’s local community supported agriculture (CSA) program into the youth program at the center, she utilizes the weekly CSA veggies to develop cooking workshops. She believes providing youth living in urban settings with the tools to draw connections between the earth, the food we can grow and the food we eat is critical, as we often become disconnected to a food’s lifecycle when living in the city. 

Jen is certified in Focusing-Oriented Art Therapy (FOAT), a technique that accesses one’s inner body wisdom and expressive arts to gain deeper insight on any changes that one’s authentic self is seeking.  She feels passionate about using artistic expression as a vehicle to heal, empower, and build community.  In the spring of 2017, she expanded her community arts efforts internationally by developing and leading a pilot arts, storytelling and wellness program for a group of 20 kids ages 10 to 15, in Punta Gorda, Belize.