Johanna Richards Fry is the Assistant Director of Center Engagement for the Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center at ASU @ Mesa City Center, part of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. She oversees community and public engagement as well as daily center operations, working to connect the people, institutions, and organizations of Mesa with the MIX Center and to keep the MIX Center grounded in the community it calls home.
Her 18+ years of social service and community engagement experience spans Missouri, Kyrgyzstan, and Arizona including work with parents navigating the child welfare system, community health education with at-risk women, and co-running a neighborhood community center.
In 2026 she completed a Master of Science in Futures and Design from ASU's School for the Future of Innovation in Society, where she explored how futures-oriented tools like civic role-play and speculative design can help communities make better long-term decisions. In 2023 she was selected as a Knowledge Exchange for Resilience Community Fellow, partnering with Mercado Mesa to research how community-led events build cohesion, identity, and resilience in the face of development pressure and displacement.
Since 2015 she has been deeply involved in the arts and development community of downtown Mesa and the Broadway Corridor.
"A community is not merely a condition of physical proximity no matter how admirable the layout….[but] the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives." –Wendell Berry
"Far from an exclusive circle, membership in [a community] comes to mean…the grateful inclusion of any who live in devotion to the wellbeing of the town and its environs." -Eric Miller