Daniel Rotsztain is an artist, writer, designer and cartographer from Toronto, Canada, and is currently based in Ithaca, New York. With a background in geography, urban planning, and landscape architecture, his work seeks to understand our relationships to the places we inhabit through landscape interventions, interactive installations, publications and illustrations. Rotsztain is the author and illustrator of All the Libraries Toronto and A Colourful History Toronto published by Dundurn Press, and his work has been featured in academic journals, edited volumes and newspapers, magazines, festivals and radio programs throughout Canada. In 2020, he went globally viral for his “Social Distance Machine,” which sought to visualize the amount of space needed to keep safe distances during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of a campaign for more pedestrianized spaces in cities; he strongly believes in design as a tool of advocacy. Rotsztain has taught at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design as part of the Masters of Urban Design Program, where he developed a seminar examining design in urban peripheries based on his ongoing research and experience as founder and co-lead of plazaPOPS, an organization that facilitates community-led transformations of parking spaces into community gathering hubs in the periphery of Toronto. He is currently a graphic design lecturer at and a founding member of MACRE in downtown Ithaca.
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