Lisa Harper Chang

Lisa Harper Chang, MSW is currently the Community Projects Director at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. This unique role is a co-appointment with the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, created to explore how social work and the arts can interact in meaningful ways. Under her leadership, the Pulitzer’s Community Projects Department has collaborated with various St. Louis institutions working in the arts, social services, and community development. While at the Pulitzer, Ms. Harper Chang has developed the Staging Old Masters and Staging Reflections of the Buddha, programs, which were designed to use art to bridge former prisoners, veterans, and the general public.

A 2010 graduate of the Community Arts Training Institute, Ms. Harper Chang received her MSW from the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, and a BA in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Rice University in Houston, Texas. She has led meditations in the Baltimore City Women’s Detention Center, played a vital role in research at a Missouri Division of Youth Services facility, and coordinated an evaluation project of co-occurring disorder clinics across the state of Missouri. In addition, Ms. Harper Chang has a strong commitment to social change through policy and has worked with the Alzheimer’s Association’s State Advocacy Director and eventually testified in front of the Missouri State Senate Committee on Health, Mental Health, Seniors, and Families regarding long-term care partnership programs.
Her professional areas of interest include exploring and evaluating the ways social work, when combined with cultural practices, can be used to empower and help fulfill the inherent potential in all people. Ms. Harper Chang loves living in St. Louis and spending time with her husband and two year-old son.