Advancing trauma-informed interventions that amplify beauty in the built environment in displacement contexts and creating art that probes the body's capacity to metabolize grief and trauma.

Devora Neumark, PhD, is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher, educator, and community-engaged practitioner whose work demonstrates that beauty in the built environment is foundational infrastructure for healing and resilience. Through collaborations with displaced communities, humanitarian agencies, and academic institutions, Neumark develops trauma-informed interventions that centre aesthetic justice in contexts of forced migration and climate disruption. As global displacement accelerates, Neumark's research and practice challenge humanitarian sectors to integrate aesthetic interventions as core components of shelter response.

Their PhD research, Radical Beauty for Troubled Times: Involuntary Displacement and the (Un)Making of Home (SSHRC-funded), bridges creative practice, policy development, and applied neuroaesthetics. This work has translated into practical applications, including a current partnership with UN-Habitat Afghanistan that applies neuroaesthetic and neuroarchitecture research to shelter repairs. Recent policy briefs co-authored with Stephanie Acker (2023–2024) reframe shelter through aesthetics, including Reimagining Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: The Role of Aesthetics in Shelter and Settlements Response (policy brief), Rethinking Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: The Role of Aesthetics in Refugee Shelter (working paper), and Aesthetics, Climate Displacement, and Mental Health (Ecopsychepedia entry).

A recent Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Fellow at the Centre for Human Rights Erlangen-Nürnberg and current Visiting Scholar at Clark University, Neumark is a Certified Climate Change Adaptation Practitioner (Yale School of Public Health) and holds a master's diploma in Emergency Management from Wilfrid Laurier University. From 2003 to 2021, they were faculty at Goddard College's MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program, where they co-founded the Indigenous and Decolonial Art Concentration. As a Canadian federal employee since 2018, Neumark has contributed policy expertise on Northern and Arctic economic development and Indigenous rights implementation.

Neumark's art praxis, grounded in decades of contemplative practice, explores the body's capacity to metabolize trauma through beauty and participation. Current projects include (in)digestion (a practice), a series of ten organic flour sack kitchen towels exploring embodied grief and what the body cannot metabolize. Their work has been exhibited internationally, most recently in South Korea and Switzerland. Based in Ottawa after seven formative years in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Neumark continues to bridge art, research, and humanitarian response to advance aesthetic justice.