Juan Flores

Juan is an artistic researcher and practitioner whose work merges architecture, human-centered design, and participatory inquiry. His perspective was shaped by nine years working across Mexico, France, and the United States, where he developed a sensitivity to the spatial and emotional atmospheres that shape how people feel and relate.

His practice is grounded in lived experience. As a 2025 Humanity in Action Fellow in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he studied how vulnerability, conflict, and memory shape civic life. In rural Pennsylvania, he organized home care workers across political divides and saw how deep listening and shared struggle can shift relationships that seem fixed. In the Peruvian Amazon, he led participatory research with displaced Indigenous communities informally settled at the banks of the Amazon river without government recognition.

Across these contexts, Juan has developed a global understanding of belonging, isolation, and how trust is built across difference. He works through deep listening, shared experience, and vulnerability; treating participants as equal partners in each intervention.

His work is in quiet dialogue with thinkers like Alain Badiou, especially the idea that truth emerges through sustained collective engagement. He is further shaped by the perspectives of Gabor Maté, Robert Greene, Eckhart Tolle, and Peter Zumthor on collective healing, discipline, presence, and atmosphere.