Through her investigations of ceramic material, responsive technologies, and the infrastructural landscapes of Coastal Louisiana and West Oakland, California, Holzman will portray a range of ways we might re-think our models of landscape. Given the accessibility and ubiquity of responsive technologies and the inherent responsive capabilities of landscape materials, there is new territory for reimagining how both physical and digital technologies shape the landscape. Holzman will present some thoughts for how we might manage, modify, and evolve the built environment in an increasingly dynamic and volatile landscape of anthropogenic change.

Justine Holzman is an adjunct assistant professor in the School of Landscape Architecture and a research affiliate for the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab at Harvard. This summer she will be in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as the 2016 Maeder-York family fellow in Landscape Studies. Holzman joins the faculty at UTK after teaching in The Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University as a visiting assistant professor where she also worked as a research fellow with the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio, a transdisciplinary think-tank working on coastal issues in Louisiana. She received an MLA from LSU and a Bachelor of Arts in Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley.

Her research recognizes the inherent responsive capabilities of landscape materiality and speculates on the development of synthetic ecologies dependent on responsive technologies for nuanced monitoring and material reconfiguration. She recently co-authored a book with Bradley Cantrell, Responsive Landscapes: Strategies for Responsive Technologies in Landscape Architecture, framing a comprehensive view of interactive and responsive projects and their relationship to environmental space. Holzman pursues ceramic art alongside landscape architecture and is exploring digital and analog methods of making with ceramic material in relation to the built environment. Her work was recently exhibited at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco at a part of “Data Clay: Digital Strategies for Parsing the Earth”.