Melissa Fisher, a cultural anthropologist, is a part-time faculty member at Parsons School of Design at The New School. She also serves as a Senior Advisor at CFAR Consulting Services, focusing on workplace culture and design, and is an Associate Researcher for the Global Foresight Project at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Her current book in progress, an ethnography, explores the imagining and design of Post-Covid work environments.
Fisher has authored two previous books: Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (co-edited with Greg Downey) and Wall Street Women. Her insights have been featured in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Work Design Magazine, and BusinessWeek, among others, and she has appeared on CNBC, NPR, and the BBC. In 2025, Avuity recognized Melissa as one of the Top 65 CRE and Work Tech Experts to Follow on LinkedIn.
Prior to her current roles, Fisher held full-time faculty positions at New York University, Georgetown University, and was most recently the Laurits Andersen Professor of Business and Organizational Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Before becoming an anthropologist, she worked in and on postmodern dance, performance, and graphic design in NYC, and as a graduate student at Wesleyan University. These experiences trained her to think about ways of connecting people, place, movement, and design. She received her BA in English Cum Laude from Barnard College and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University.