Connection Lab works at the intersection of art and health promotion to create meaningful engagement, creative outlets and learning opportunities for people of all ages and interests.
Through collaborative community art projects, data sculptures, studio art, team-building events and creative data collection, our team can help you and your community create something beautiful.
We are based in Somerville, MA.
Emily Bhargava
As an artist and community organizer, Emily is skilled at facilitation, organizational development, fostering collaborations, arts integration, and evaluation design. With a masters in Medical Anthropology and over 25 years of experience, she is able to help groups define their goals, articulate their visions, and develop solid plans to achieve them. Emily often works at the intersection of art and public health, helping communities utilize the arts as an effective tool for health promotion. She brings a strong focus on cultural appropriateness and health equity as well as an interest in qualitative data to all of her work. She is a systems-thinker who develops frameworks, planning models, and new methods of capacity building for communities and organizations.
Emily is a certified prevention specialist and has extensive experience in community-level prevention in the areas of substance abuse, suicide, teen pregnancy, obesity and HIV. Additionally, Emily serves as the Community Art Director for The Beautiful Stuff Project, a creative reuse center in Somerville, MA, and chair of the Programming committee for the New England Mosaic Society.
Rahul Bhargava
Rahul is an educator, researcher, designer, and facilitator who builds collaborative projects to interrogate our datafied society with a focus on rethinking participation and power in data processes. He has created big data research tools to investigate media attention, built hands-on interactive museum exhibits that delight learners of all ages, and run over 100 workshops to build data culture in newsrooms, non-profits, and libraries. With Catherine D’Ignazio, he built Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities that introduce learners from various domains to working with data. Rahul has collaborated with a wide range of groups, from the Boston Globe to the St. Paul library system and the World Food Program. Rahul’s museum installations have appeared at the Fuller Craft Museum, Boston Museum of Science, Eyebeam in New York City, and the Tech Interactive in San Jose.
Beyond Connection Lab, Rahul is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Art + Design at Northeastern University, where he directs the Data Culture Group. His research there spans the fields of computational journalism, data storytelling, and community data practices. Rahul’s academic projects have been supported by the NSF, Knight Foundation, and others. He regularly publishes in journals such as the International Journal of Communication, the Journal of Community Informatics, and been presented at conferences such as AEJMC, IEEE Vis, and ICWSM.
Hi first book, Community Data, is out now from Oxford University Press.
