Deanna Van Buren
Design director and co-founder, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces
An international leader in developing a radical transformation of the entire criminal justice pipeline, Deanna Van Buren is the design director and co-founder of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJ+DS), an architecture and real estate development firm that works across disciplines to attack the root causes of mass incarceration.
She currently sits on the national board of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. Her firm, DJDS is an Oakland-based non-profit architecture and real estate development firm working with non-profit, government, and community partners to develop the infrastructure to end mass incarceration through the support of diversion and re-entry.
Van Buren’s projects include the Syracuse Peacemaking Center in New York; Restore Oakland, a multi-use hub for restorative justice and workforce development in East Oakland in collaboration with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United); and Pop-Up Resource Village, a mobile site activation tool that brings a constellation of resources to under-resourced communities. Van Buren is also the co-founder of BIG Oakland (Building Industry Gathering), a co-working space supporting small minority- and women-owned firms in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry.