About
Devorah Block is a strategist and educator exploring how knowledge becomes useful — how it's made visible, shared across disciplines, and becomes something organisations and communities can act on.
Her work crosses boundaries that usually keep research, practice, and public participation separate. With over twenty years working with museums, civic organisations, schools, and built environment practices across the USA, UK and Italy, her experience spans cultural strategy, learning design, and place-based practice.
Her current focus is Place Literacy: the capability to understand, articulate, and engage with Place as a relational whole created through the interaction of natural, built, and social environments. It enables people to recognise how place shapes the conditions of life, how they participate in shaping place, and how their knowledge and practice connect with those of others. She develops Place Literacy through practice-based research, teaching, learning design, and direct community engagement.
Devorah co-founded IF/ Design Labs with Thomas Bryans in 2025. IF/ is a think tank and design laboratory for urban futures, working at the intersection of research, design, and learning to help communities and organisations imagine and shape better cities.
The Place Literacy Lab, where much of her current research and practice is based, sits within IF/ and serves as the incubator for the Place Literacy Campaign, which she co-founded in 2023. The Campaign works towards broad recognition of Place Literacy as a core civic capacity and shared organising concept, grounded in a holistic understanding of place as a value-neutral relational whole emerging through the interaction of built, natural, and social environments, and providing a common frame through which people and institutions can recognise, connect, and develop their different contributions to understanding and shaping place.
She is a Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University (MA in Museum Studies). She has been Associate Editor of the Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship (Routledge) since 2014. She is co-founder and advisory board member of CIRCI, the International Centre for Research in the Culture of Childhood, based in Reggio Emilia. She is also a member of the Edge, a cross-disciplinary built environment think tank focused on sustainability.
Current Roles and Affiliations
Devorah holds a PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2016). Her thesis, Learning Resilience: The Role of Learning in Facilitating Sustainable Organisational Change in Cultural Organisations, developed two original frameworks: Sustainable Organisational Change, a model for internally generated, reflexive, identity-preserving change in cultural institutions; and Resilient Learning, a form of organisational learning that strengthens an organisation's capacity to absorb, adapt, and renew over time. Both continue to underpin her practice.
She also holds an MA in Art History from Syracuse University and a BA in Art History and Theory from the University of Sydney.
Academic Background
Devorah is based in Florence, where she lives with her two children, and works regularly in London. She is available for work across both contexts and travels for the right projects.