MIT World Speakers

Alexa Mills

At the MIT Community Innovator Lab, Alexa Mills combines her passion for stories with her passion for bottom-up urban planning. Mills works directly with communities to develop media that express their perspective on various issues. Mills' body of work includes Predatory Tales, the true stories of predatory lending scams in Lawrence, Massachusetts; an interactive map of Tambo de Mora, Peru, hand-drawn by local teenagers seeking to describe their town to outsiders; and a series of short films about organizing to protect the environment from the coal industry in eastern Kentucky. All projects use various forms of media to express a community's perspective on an issue.

Mills earned her B.A. in English, with a concentration in Medieval Literature, from Cornell University in 2003. She earned her Master's in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008. Before attending MIT, Alexa directed the SAFE Victim Advocacy Program in the Domestic Violence Unit of the Washington D.C. city courthouse.