The Bronx Leadership & Organizing Center
2025
Team
Beatriz Lozano, Creative Director
Michelle Castellanos, Designer
Emily Li, Designer
Poster campaign across The Bronx Defenders' community organizing to dismantle the cradle to prison pipeline.
Collaborating closely with The Bronx Leadership & Organizing Center (BLOC) team, we designed a poster campaign to highlight their organizing around housing, community leadership, and shifting the conversation on social and economic mobility in the Bronx. Our inspiration came from The Bronx Writes Back, BLOC’s anthology of youth writing that reclaims lived experiences through storytelling. That spirit shaped the hand-drawn typography and bold, comic book-inspired visuals.
This project began as a motion-first campaign, but when we learned there are no digital bus shelters in the Bronx, it underscored how inequities in infrastructure shape access to art and technology. An example reflecting the broader disparities of uneven resource distribution across NYC boroughs. In response, we paired the static posters with an image recognition AR experience, where your phone camera can recognize the poster design and bring it to life by activating the animation.
With motion no longer being the primary way neighbors walking by would experience the work, we leaned into making the static composition as dynamic as possible, taking into consideration that a singular poster needed to stand out alone at bus stops, while working together when aligned as wheatpastes throughout the borough.
