Emily Wettstein

Education

MLA, Harvard GSD; M.Arch, Harvard GSD; BA Studio Art and a minor in Psychology, Lehigh University

Biography

Emily Wettstein joined the UVA Landscape Architecture Department as a tenure-track assistant professor in Spring 2022. Prior, she was a design critic in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where she taught studios, and courses in representation and climate change. With a background in architecture, art, documentation, and fabrication, she explores the overlaps among the built environment’s parallel disciplines.

Her current research runs in two parallel agendas that share a foundational grounding in the agency of marginalized sites and subjects. In A Student-as-Site Pedagogy she seeks to construct a more inclusive design pedagogy by approaching students in the way that design, and particularly landscape architecture, approaches sites, with attention to situation, position, and identity, and as generative of their own specific potentialities. In Liminal Landscapes of Reckoning, she researches the potential of liminal sites to facilitate critical confrontation and dialogue, currently focusing on the New Jersey Meadowlands and Morenci, Arizona.

Emily has also taught advanced architecture studios at Northeastern University and previously worked in the photo and film industry, primarily with the photographer Martin Schoeller, and on documentaries that include ArchiCulture and Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present. She holds two graduate degrees from the Harvard GSD in architecture and landscape architecture, where her graduate architecture thesis, “Non-site: Displacing Purgatory,” was nominated for the James Templeton Kelley Prize. In addition, she has a bachelor of art in Studio Art with a minor in Psychology.