An activist, designer, media-content creator and lecturer, Coatanza-Chock focuses her work on social movements, the organisation of transformational media, and justice design, among other matters. She is a Harvard graduate and has PhD from the University of Southern California, is Associate Professor in Civic Media at MIT and Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. 

She is the author of Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement (2014) and Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the World We Need (2020). She is also a board member of Allied Media Projects and a member of the Design Justice Steering Committee.