Munus Shih

Adjunct Instructor

Munus Shih is a Taiwanese Hakka designer, coder, and organizer based in NYC who is passionate about bringing more critical and diverse perspectives to teaching code. Munus was a fellow for the Processing Foundation, where they contributed to open-source projects and helped develop decolonial teaching resources. As an organizer, Munus co-founded SpOnAcT!, a collective and garden for gender and neuro queer folks in Taiwan. They are also a co-founder of Duty Free, a design collective that explores the liminal space of art, code, and the solidarity economy. Currently, Duty Free is a member of NEW INC, an art and technology incubator led by the New Museum. Munus’s practice explores critical code, queer studies, and community building and has been recognized through fellowships, festivals, and conferences, including Creative Coding Taiwan, the 2023 Open Source Art Contributor Conference, and IBM Quantum Design. Munus received their M.F.A. in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design. They currently work as a Creative Technologist at Athletics, and teach at The New School and Cooper Union.

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Screenshot of DT Soulmate Matcher, a data-driven project exploring how we can weave community data together through a live website, 2022.

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.