Issachar Curbeon is a systems designer and strategist specializing in helping designers engage with the emotional complexity surrounding problems in order to avoid perpetuating systems of oppression in their work and in their team dynamics.  Her work focuses on leveraging distress as a tool for systems design – addressing complex systemic injustices that evoke despair, confusion, tension, and insecurity,  using emotional unrest as a catalyst for reimagining solutions at the margins of collective imagination.

Her work integrates design thinking, nervous system theory, and complexity science to confront distressing societal challenges that require emotional resilience and innovation.

With over 10 years of consulting experience in Black reproductive justice, ed-tech justice, Black liberation, and maternal health justice, she recently led a three-year grant to reduce infant mortality rates in Brooklyn, New York. 

Issachar has a BS in Global Studies from the New School. Her recent collaborations include organizations like the NAACP Climate Justice Working Group, ACLU of Northern California, and Elephant Circle.  In her free time, Issachar is constantly learning how to be a better student and teacher in her favorite social spaces: holiday dinners, barbershops, packed kitchens, rap battles and workshops of unlikely collaborators.