Justin LeBlanc

Justin Dougan-LeBlanc (formerly Justin LeBlanc) is an artist working across sculpture, installation, and wearable forms. Using sculptural garments and textile-based structures, his work explores how communication, gesture, and spatial environments shape the body and organize movement through space.

His practice is informed by navigating multiple systems of communication, including American Sign Language, spoken language, and technologies used by deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Moving between these systems, Dougan-LeBlanc examines how communication and perception produce moments of friction, adaptation, and misalignment. Rather than reducing disability to identity alone, his work approaches sensory difference as a condition that shapes perception, embodiment, and the ways bodies move through space.

Moving between hand fabrication and digital processes such as 3D printing and laser cutting, Dougan-LeBlanc engages materials ranging from soft textiles to industrial surfaces. His sculptural and wearable works consider how scale, repetition, weight, and bodily contact reshape expectations of the body and the spaces it occupies, often embedding subtle references to systems of language and access.

Dougan-LeBlanc is the first Deaf professor in the field of fashion and serves on the faculty of the School of Fashion at Columbia College Chicago. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Schwules Museum, Berlin, as well as private collections. He lives and works in Chicago with his husband and two children.