James is a writer, creative director, and designer. His first book, The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir (W. W. Norton), documents fifty-thousand miles through America, and his work has been exhibited in the Rubin Museum of Art, the Annenberg Space for Photography, the Mint Museum, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. He frequently collaborates with Candy Chang on installations that introduce new rituals into public space. Their most recent project, After the End, “provides a place for anyone suffering loss or battered by contemporary life to mourn, meditate and perhaps heal a little” (The New York Times). He is an assistant professor at the New School and a 2022 Innovator-in-Residence at the American School in London.