Jose Cotto
551 Tremont Street, Studio 314
www.josecotto.com on Instagram
Jose Cotto is an artist, designer, and community engagement practitioner from the Great Brook Valley neighborhood of Worcester, MA. He currently serves as Director of Community Engagement & Design Justice at Utile, where he works with project teams across planning and architecture projects and leads ongoing JEDI efforts. His creative and professional practice explores relationships between people, place, and time—integrating poetry, fabrication, architectural design, mark-making, and lens-based media across community visioning initiatives, participatory planning processes, and sustained artistic inquiry.
Prior to joining Utile, he was part of the team at the Small Center for Collaborative Design at Tulane University's School of Architecture, where he led exhibits and public programming that facilitated connections between academia, local artists, and community partners to expand conversations around the built environment, supported design + build and visioning projects, and led yearly seminars focused on public space, public interest design, and interdisciplinary practices.
Cotto earned a Master of Architecture from Tulane University (2014) and a BFA in Design + Architecture from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2011). His artistic practice has been recognized through exhibitions, residencies, and presentations in the United States and internationally. He is a Salzburg Global Seminar Cultural Innovators Fellow (2018), Joan Mitchell Center Artist in Residence (2022), A Studio in the Woods resident (2022, 2024), and current studio resident at Boston Center for the Arts.
