Michael Kopp is an artist, creative director, and cultural strategist working at the intersection of visual culture, public space, and guest experience. His practice examines how images, environments, and programs shape social relationships—particularly within spaces where culture, commerce, and community converge.
Trained as an artist and educator, Kopp brings an anti-colonial lens to creative direction, asking how power circulates through images, spatial design, and storytelling—and how those systems can be reoriented toward equity, care, and collective belonging. His work approaches the camera and the built environment as parallel tools: both capable of reinforcing dominant narratives, and both capable of being redesigned as instruments of resistance, memory, and shared experience.
Kopp has collaborated with institutions including Norton Healthcare, the University of Louisville, Louisville Metro Government, and the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. His writing has appeared in the International Journal of Drug Policy, and his public scholarship has been featured on the TED Talk Network. He has presented research nationally and exhibited work internationally, including in Rome and Glasgow. In 2024, he began a two-year residency with the Arquetopia Foundation in Puebla, Mexico, where his ongoing work engages colonial history, local heritage, and site-specific image-making.
He currently serves as Program Manager for Mashup Food Hall and Genuine Work Coworking in Louisville’s NuLu district, where he leads creative direction, cultural programming, and guest experience strategy. In this role, Kopp designs hospitality ecosystems that integrate food, art, wellness, and community programming—transforming shared spaces into platforms for cultural exchange, economic sustainability, and civic imagination. If academia asked why images matter, Mashup is where that question gets operationalized, one guest experience at a time.
