About Us

Photo: Creative Newark Call to Collaboration at NJIT

Host Team includes Suzanne Ishee and Certificate in Creative Placemaking graduates: Pamela Daniels, Susan Lazzari, Stephanie Neal and Gillian Sarjeant-Allen.

NJIT Hub for Creative Placemaking

Our Mission

Creative Placemaking is the intentional integration of arts, culture and community-engaged design into the process of community planning and development. NJIT’s Hub for Creative Placemaking develops and shares the components of the Creative Placemaking framework to support social equity, inclusive economic growth, and opportunity in the places people live, work and play.

Our Vision

The vision of the NJIT Hub for Creative Placemaking is to  advance the practice of creative placemaking.  The Hub serves as a professional training and resource center and collaborative platform that aligns and enables NJIT faculty and students to partner with arts organizations and local artists, community planners and citizens, civic, business and corporate leaders, philanthropists, environmentalists, educators, activists and others interested in leveraging the arts and a creative process to help shape policies and planning that revitalize physical spaces and locations and leverage community-engaged design which results in social and economic well-being of local communities.

Our Goals

  • Facilitate the collaboration of creative placemaking planners with NJIT’s diverse faculty expertise spanning the humanities and cultural studies, engineering, sciences, technology, architecture and design, and business management
  • Train a new generation of creative placemakers – professionals in diverse fields such as design and planning, real estate development, economic development, arts, law, community organizing, and health care.
  • Engage NJIT’s students through course work and real world experiences focused on integrating arts, culture and community-engaged design to ignite economic development, address social equity, and reinvigorate community.
  • Build community capacity through  technical assistance that helps communities identify their needs, link and leverage their assets, and develop partnerships and collaborations
  • Conduct research that supports and informs field-building for Creative Placemaking.
  • Advance culturally relevant business development.

Our Team

Suzanne Ishee, Director, NJIT Hub for Creative Placemaking and Film/TV/Media Workforce Development 

Suzanne Ishee serves as Curriculum Developer and Lead instructor for the NJIT Hub.  Suzanne is an Emmy and Drama Desk Award winning producer, actor and playwright veteran of the entertainment industry. In 2009, she expanded her arts career into the Creative Placemaking field through supporting the formation of Arts Build Communities at Rutgers University as Advisory Board Chairperson.  In 2011, she co-founded the Center for Creative Placemaking (CCP) where she continued to advance the field of practice through promotion, thought leadership, and training. She designed and developed Creative Placemaking content for numerous sector-specific workshops including those for professionals who practice Real Estate, Downtown Management, Conservation, Public Art, Professional Artists, and numerous others. She developed the curriculum for NJIT's Certificate in Creative Placemaking and co-developed the curriculum for NJIT's  Certificate in Location Management for Film and TV. She has provided expertise and engagement in numerous CP-related efforts in the region including as original Co-Chair of the Livable Task Force for NJ Transportation Planning Authority/Together North Jersey, as original member of the Western Highlands Scenic Byway Management Board and the Morris Canal Greenway Redevelopment Working Group. She serves on the stewardship council of the 3-state/9-county Scenic, Wild Delaware River Geotourism Initiative, and since its inception remains an active member of Sustainable Jersey’s Arts and Creative Culture Task Force through evaluation of NJ municipality’s annual submissions.  Suzanne serves as manager for Martin Tuchman School of Management/NJIT Hub for Creative Placemaking events and most recently has been providing leadership for NJIT's curriculum development and engagement with New Jersey's burgeoning Film/TV industry.

Dr. Colette Santasieri, Hub Co-Founder

Dr. Santasieri recently retired as Executive Director of the Center for Community Systems within the Hillier College of Architecture and Design, and the Executive Director of the NJ Brownfields Assistance Center @NJIT and the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s (NJIT) Technical Assistance to Brownfields Communities Program.  She possesses over 35 years of land use, environmental, and infrastructure planning, and community development experience. She has extensive experience and expertise in the planning and design of sustainable and resilient communities, properties, and civil infrastructure systems; community visioning for redevelopment; brownfields redevelopment; transit-oriented development; identifying and analyzing a project’s impacts on socio-economic, natural, and man-made settings as well as on environmental justice communities; and providing technical assistance and educational forums to elected officials, government staff, nonprofits, and the public. Prior to her retirement, she served as co-instructor of the NJIT Creative Placemaking Professional Certificate course. 

Dr. Michael Ehrlich, Co-Director, New Jersey Innovation Acceleration Center and Hub Co-Founder

Ehrlich had an international business career before joining NJIT in 2007. He spent his last Wall Street years at Bear Stearns as Senior Managing Director of the Emerging Markets Fixed Income Business. Upon leaving Wall Street, Ehrlich became an entrepreneur and started FineStar Imaging LLC, a small technology company that specialized in document production and management. Ehrlich, who belongs to the NY Angels, focuses his research on the commercialization of technology. Ehrlich established and is the advisor to the Entrepreneur's Society, a student club at NJIT. With support from Capital One Bank, he established the New Business Model Competition (NBMC), an early-stage business model competition in its 11th year, for Newark and North Jersey-based students (undergraduate and graduate) as well as North Jersey community-based businesses and entrepreneurs. Winners of the NBMC (eight winners last year) receive a fellowship that pays them to work on their new business ideas and to attend the NJIT – MTSM Lean Startup Accelerator program to launch their new businesses. Ehrlich works extensively with NJIT faculty/student teams to help them transform their research into commercial innovations. He was an early participant in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program and since 2015 he has been the principal investigator directing the NSF I-Corps Site at NJIT where he funds 30-40 faculty-student teams each year ($2-3K/team). With Judith Sheft, Ehrlich co-lead the HealthIT connections program, funded by JPMorgan Chase Small Business Forward Initiative, which helps the overall regional HealthIT cluster and provides support for growth-stage companies to accelerate their growth rate and create good quality jobs for the region. Ehrlich has published research in the Journal of Business Venturing, Babson conference proceedings, and other top journals.
 

 
 

Judith Sheft, Hub Co-Founder

Judith A. Sheft is Executive Director of the NJ Commission on Science, Technology and Innovation.  She is former Associate Vice President Strategic Relationships and External Affairs at New Jersey Innovation Institute at NJIT.  In her prior position, she was Co-Director of the NJ Innovation Acceleration Center and involved with regional economic and cluster development having responsibilities for the HealthIT Connections entrepreneurial cluster development program, the NJIT I-Corps Site and the Procurement Technical Assistance Center.