Regina Chen

Senior Principal, Process and Learning

Boston, MA, USA

Regina Chen sees design as a catalyst for restoration. She brings a multidisciplinary background in architecture, engineering, planning, and research to understand how the built environment can transform the legacies of inequity into opportunities for abundance. 

At MASS, Regina serves as a Senior Principal and Managing Director of Process and Learning. Since 2013, Regina has fostered a culture of learning and mutuality both at MASS and in the field at large, developing processes that champion accountability and push the bounds of design excellence. Her diverse body of work, spanning community engagement, research, narrative development, and process design, is marked by the capacity for deep listening and for guiding partners towards asking the questions that drive meaningful impact. 

As the Principal-in-Charge of the Restorative Justice Design Lab and the Gun Violence Memorial Project, Regina maintains a deep commitment to community engagement and creating space for truth-telling, healing, and collective action. In 2017, she launched MASS’s Advocacy team, where she oversaw publications such as Justice is Beauty and exhibitions including Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics, jointly curated with the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Her work centers an empowering process, healing design, and a focus on training and evaluation to bring about systemic change.

Regina studied Civil Engineering and Architecture at Princeton University, and received her Master in Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Regina was a contributing writer in a recent publication, Carceral Architecture: From Within and Beyond the Prison Walls, published by Princeton University Press. Her chapter, “The Architecture of Decarceration” argues that mass incarceration is not simply a justice system failure, but the predictable outcome of how we have designed and segregated our neighborhoods. The chapter calls for redesigning neighborhoods: investing in affordable housing, social cohesion, community-based care, and culturally rooted spaces that address the social determinants of health.