• • • Landscapes, History, Theory, Design, Research • • •

Christianna is an Albany-based designer and educator who specializes in interdisciplinary practice bridging Landscape and Architecture. After growing up in the Albany area, Christianna studied landscape architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and practiced in Los Angeles, Boston, the Adirondacks, and the Hudson Valley. Her pedagogical research draws inspiration from environmental ethics, aesthetics, psychology, and philosophy to explore architecture as a critical cultural and environmental practice. 

Christianna's writing and teaching center environmental ethics, psychology, aesthetics, critical theory, and social justice. Her interests converge in the exploration of the environment through critical historical and philosophical lenses. Science and technology studies, histories of science, and environmental history inform her research. Her work examines how architecture plays a conscious role in cultural production and how design can be the source of new socio- and environmental practices -- to bring individuals closer to their local landscapes and to develop intimate environmental literacy. This research and its associated pedagogical models embrace speculative world-building modalities that have envisioned "landscape-machines -- where landscapes generate architecture -- and processes where the construction of architecture gives rise to new forms of landscape and environments. Her research also explores parafiction and documentarian-style historical retellings and counter-factual narratives that provoke deeper analysis of representations of the future and ideologies of 'the everyday'.'

Prof Bennett is interested in understanding the emotional impact that environmental imagery, aesthetics, rhetorics, and representational systems have on our relationships to the environment. Especially as these 'habits of mind' pertain to developing a more intimate and personal environmental literacy. Her work explores the power of storytelling to unveil new perspectives on environmental ethics and aesthetics, especially by means of immersive storytelling through unconventional pov's.

Christianna draws inspiration and motivation from the work of a number of individuals, friends, and colleagues, including: Evan Douglis, Rhett Russo, Ed Eigen, Mae-ling Lokko, Elaine Stokes, Michael Belding, Andreea Vasile Hoxha, Rawan Al Saffar, Weaam Al Abdullah, Jeremy Kamal Hartley, Hannah Gaengler, Faye Nixon, Yufan Gao, Sam Solano, Ryan Scavnicky, Kristen Mimms Scavnicky, Adrienne Economos-Milller, Walaid Sehwail, Ryo Imaeda, William Virgil, Alberto deSalvatierra, Zannah Matson, Susan Herrington, Lorraine Daston, Pierre Belanger, James C. Scott, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Octavia E. Butler, Ray Bradbury, Becky Chambers ... 

Thank you, I am so indebted to those whom I've encountered and learned from.

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