Rew Otto Gordon is a cultural curator and serial founder whose work explores how people gather, build meaning, and imagine new forms of collective life. Working across the midwest in various institutions and creating new ones, Rew’s work often focuses on building original ways of understanding through collective joy. Organizations are their medium, and their practice examines the structures that shape human connection and creates environments that invite participation, encounter, and reflection. Drawing from traditions of community organizing and interdisciplinary collaboration, their projects often operate between performance and infrastructure: part exhibition, part social experiment, part public platform for play.

Interested in how institutions can become sites of belonging, Rew develops projects that foreground curiosity and unexpected forms of exchange. Their work frequently engages questions of participation, community, and the conditions that allow strangers to become co-conspirators.

Originally from Chicago, Rew has called various parts of the midwest home. They are the founder of Mitchell Street Arts, The Token Institute, and Midwest Humanities, and have led initiatives across the arts, civic engagement, and cultural production. Their projects have received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Herzfeld Foundation, and the State of Wisconsin. Rew holds a Masters degree from Northwestern University in Leadership for Creative Enterprises and a Bachelor of Arts from Hampshire College in Art & Education.