Mobile County, Alabama (2021)
I’m an experimental geographer, designer, artist-filmmaker, and shipwright.
Rooted in an ethics of edge conditions, I use sight-/site-based expeditions to drift along and intervene upon the margins of established disciplines and knowledge. My interests across the fields of geography and environmental humanities are rather sprawling, and include experimental films and critical travelogues, political ecology and landscape studies, the infrastructures of logistics and extraction, and the many lives of planetary urbanization. Often operating in design's blind spots, I draw upon literary, media, and technological cultures to rework the representational and material practices that make peripheral worlds newly legible, or keep them hidden.
By building boats, riding cargo ships, and embedding myself in the logistical systems that organize contemporary life, I stage encounters with those very places that continually escape easy capture: toxic river corridors, nuclear hangovers, contested pipelines, capsized vessels, and military and carceral sites. Geographically, my practice is frequently anchored in the operational zones and resource frontiers of the Southeastern United States, a fraught mooring from which to trace the circulation of materials and lifeforms across the planet. In a moment when design is called to deliver certainty, I foreground wonder and doubt in my essays and films as necessary practices, insisting that to be a passenger-traveler along flows and scales far beyond one’s kind is to pursue new ways of being with and within overlooked worlds.
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I received my doctorate from Harvard University, Graduate School of Design. I am a 2026 Nominee for the National Design Award (emerging designer), and for 2024-2025, I was a Fellow with the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. Recently, "Tunnel Vision: Notes from 'Generic' Atlanta" was published in Urban Geography; James Enos and I have a chapter in Post-Rational Visuality (May, 2025); “Void Almanac” was published in GeoHumanities (Oct. 2024); I convened the RealTimeNature conference at the Harvard GSD (Sept. 2024). Port Futures + Social Logistics is building towards its next exhbition series in the fall (2025)!
I’m from North Carolina, and I live in Cambridge, MA, USA. I welcome messages at anniesimpson (at) gsd (dot) harvard (dot) edu. My CV – exhibition and screening record, courses taught, published scholarship, etc – is available here. Portfolio, films, exhibition images, and press archive are also available upon request. Methodologically, I work by getting lost alongside my canine companion-collaborator, Boudreaux.
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Currently, I'm designing and building sensor-equipped canoes to probe the overlooked ecologies at the air–water boundary. Blending experimental craft with site-specific measurement, the project unsettles inherited ways of seeing, translating turbulence, surface tension, and atmospheric stress into new forms of narrative and ecological care. I'm also working on a very localized social history of GIS: tracing the awkward proximity of Harvard's Labratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis and campus anti-war activism under the Vietnam era’s competing visions of spatial control.
My most recent project – in essays [The View from Nowhere] and an essay film [Under Story] – is a series of journeys that follow pine trees as 1) a planetary commodity shaped by the plantation legacy of the U.S. Southeast and 2) a contested node in so-called green energy transition: biomass. Centering on the ecological uncanny in Georgia – feral dogs, pine monocultures, mystery fish, military environmentalism (the list goes on) – the project cracks open dominant visual and economic paradigms (fragmentation, concealment, reclassification) that obscure uneven geographies of extraction.
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My projects have been supported by the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative; Harvard University, Dean’s Merit Award and the Doctor of Design Research Grant; Monument Lab, National Fellowship; the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina; Duke University, John Hope Franklin Documentary Fellowship; University of Georgia, Campus Sustainability Grant, Willson Center Graduate Research Award, Broun Fund Award, and Graduate School Travel Grant.
My work has been exhibited or screened at sites including Zou-no-hana Terrace [Yokohama, Japan]; Bierumer School [Bierum, Netherlands]; Pier2 Artcenter [Kaohsiung, Taiwan]; Harvard University, Kirkland Gallery [Cambridge, MA]; the Goeth-Instituts across North America [Boston, Chicago, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Montreal, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington, DC]; Purdue University, Patti and Rusty Rueff Galleries [West Lafayette, IN]; Atheneum [Athens, GA]; The Carrack [Durham NC].
Other semi-recent projects include instances of nuclear spelunking in the deep South, passenger-traveler expeditions through watersheds of planetary energy transition, and various investigations of tunnels and financialization in Atlanta, capsized cargo ships off of the Georgia coast, and zones of migration/production struggle in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley. Previously, I worked alongside my first companion-collaborator Mandy (honorary MFA from the University of Georgia, 2022). She was a very good dog.