The Invisible Institute is a nonprofit journalism production company on the South Side of Chicago. We work to enhance the capacity of citizens to hold public institutions accountable. As we address the racial inequities that deform our society, we also work to alter the asymmetrical power dynamic within journalism by creating the conditions for people to drive their own narratives, putting our craft at the service of their experience. Our work is organized around a central principle: we have co-responsibility with the government for maintaining respect for human rights and, when abuses occur, for demanding redress.

We use a variety of tools including investigative reporting, multimedia storytelling, human rights documentation, the curation of public information, and the orchestration of difficult public conversations. The Invisible Institute produces work in the medium that best carries the narrative; all of our narrative work starts with long term investigations prioritizing stories that otherwise would not be told. To date, our work has appeared as written publications, podcasts, art exhibits, and public dialogues, including the four-part series “Code of Silence” published in The Intercept and local print via South Side Weekly; the part-investigation and part-memoir podcasts Somebody and You Didn’t See Nothin; a collaboration with Forensic Architecture investigating the killing of Harith Augustus (presented of Chicago Architecture Biennial), a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigation Mauled, and other investigative forms springing from our seminal data projects: CPDP.co and Beneath the Surface.