Matthew Seibert

Education

Master of Landscape Architecture, Louisiana State University, Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture; Bachelor of Arts, University of Texas at Austin, Humanities Honors Program

Biography

Matthew Seibert's work aspires to encourage one to rethink their position and relation to the world as the first, fundamental step in a theory of change towards a just, more promising future.

Matthew’s research and teaching challenge dominant modes of knowledge production, employing alternative methodologies and immersive representational tools to cultivate a pluralistic understanding of being in the world. This practice and pedagogy in support of a world where many worlds and worldviews are not only welcome, but desired, is built by creatively interrogating conventional epistemologies—from the solutionism and ostensible objectivity of science to the universalism of history. This is achieved through three core methodologies of decentering: 1) engaging human perception as medium in iterative body-schema simulation, 2) engaging the nonhuman as medium in more-than-human narratives, and 3) engaging history as medium in parafictional design research.

Matthew's work has been recognized by organizations from the American Society of Landscape Architects to the US Environmental Protection Agency, exhibited across the country from New York to San Francisco, and published internationally. Most recently, his research with collaborators has been published by Routledge Press in Atlas of Material Worlds: Mapping the Agency of Matter, a highly designed narrative atlas investigating the agency of nonliving materials with unique, ubiquitous, and often hidden influence on our daily lives. His new book project, tentatively titled The Dark Side of Green: A Narrative Atlas of the Costs and Cautions behind our Clean Energy Utopia, is an edited collection of scholars and activists employing immersive first-person narrative descriptions and rich imagery to tell the oft-revealing stories of contestation, exploitation, and complication within the landscapes upon which the world’s green energy transition depends.

Matthew's academic career follows his work as a landscape designer for Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects in NYC, contributing to such projects as Hudson Yards and pro-bono design research on the Gowanus Canal.