PROJECTS




Artist Resume

Academic Curriculum Vitae


I am a landscape designer, scholar, and teacher based in Ithaca, NY. My work explores environmental imaginaries that emerge together with new ways of being and acting in the world.


As a maker:
I adore Earth’s livingness, am fascinated by its complexity, and yearn to grasp its transformations as it warms. I believe that making and sharing novel earthly visions can better equip people to navigate rapid environmental change. And so, I make: to glimpse planetary phenomena anew, to share those glimpses with others, to offer attunements to climate and land.

My creative practice is interdisciplinary, building on my expertise as a designer, teacher, historian, and theorist of landscape architecture. My work engages a landscape architectural tradition: drawing and making in order to understand existing sites and imagine their futures. Rather than using these methods to design specific sites, I use them to explore unbound landscape conditions: material fluxes and flows, formations of varying scales and tempos. I am particularly interested in representing occurrences that are not easily perceived by humans yet are essential to life on earth: large-scale climatological shifts, geological formations, movements of carbon and other particulates through the atmosphere.

My miniature landscapes, Unruly Earths, are process-based works. I layer sediments and fluids into a jar, see what they make of themselves, and add more in response to what emerges. As the jar’s contents accrete and change over time, I document what occurs. The resulting images and short videos are both abstract and immediate, invoking natural phenomena at ambiguous and multiple scales. My new project under development, Sensing Carbon, builds on the visual language of Unruly Earths in an augmented reality application that enables users to visualize flows of carbon in their immediate environment. Both projects offer new sensory touchstones for living on a transforming planet.


As a scholar: I specialize in landscape history and theory. My research explores intersections of design representation, public dialogue, and environmental imaginaries. I investigate ethics and politics inherent to the skilled work of designing built environments, and I situate design work in relation to broader social movements and cultural understandings of cities, natures, technologies, and power. I am particularly interested in the emergence of new ways of seeing landscapes and natural phenomena, from the early 20th century to the present. I explore how visual expression intertwines with other forms of knowing and acting to generate new environmental knowledges, ethics, and practices.

My recent research project, Envisioning Environment: The Landscape Imaginaries of Urban US Freeways, 1956-1968, investigates local histories underlying several well-known late modernist freeway designs: revealing how designer visions of urban freeways collided and coincided with activist actions and government agendas to precipitate new urban visions, forms of political action, and conceptions of environmental justice. Other current projects explore new ways of understanding and designing for climate change (Sensing and showing climate change), and articulate how different techniques and methods cultivate reciprocity and liveliness within design process (Designing with). This work contributes to discussions in the fields of landscape history, history of technology, environmental history, and the environmental humanities, and informs contemporary debates in landscape architecture and urban design. 


As a professional: Currently teaching landscape history at the University of Toronto, I have taught landscape architectural design, representation, history, and theory as an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Université de Montréal, and at University of Buffalo, Cornell University, California Polytechnic State University – San Luis Obispo, and University of Detroit Mercy. I hold a Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and Urbanism from Cornell University, a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Swarthmore College. As a designer I have worked for CMG Landscape Architecture, the Detroit Collaborative Design Center, and various San Francisco-based firms.