Justin Dougan-LeBlanc is an artist working across sculpture, installation, and wearable forms. Trained in architecture and fashion, his practice draws on textile materials and spatial relationships to examine how clothing, objects, and built environments shape bodies and space over time.
Shaped by translation between multiple systems of access, including American Sign Language, speech-based communication, and auditory assistive technologies, Dougan-LeBlanc works from a position attentive to friction and misalignment. His work considers how competing modes of communication and perception organize movement, legibility, and power in physical space. Rather than positioning disability as subject or identity, his practice approaches sensory difference as a condition that structures perception and embodiment.
Moving between hand fabrication and digital processes such as 3D printing and laser cutting, Dougan-LeBlanc works with materials ranging from soft textiles to industrial surfaces. His sculptural and wearable forms examine social expectations of the body, tracing what is gained, altered, and lost through repetition, weight, scale, and bodily contact.
Dougan-LeBlanc teaches in the School of Fashion at Columbia College Chicago, where he is recognized as the first full Deaf professor in the field of fashion. His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in museum and private collections.