RECENT: "Void Almanac: A Political-Geologic Rubbing of Nuclear Testing in Mississippi" in GeoHumanities. Access here.

 

Annie Simpson is an artist and experimental geographer. She works via sight-/site-based investigation to make videos, photographs, and essays. Simpson moonlights as a doctoral candidate (ABD, Criticism & Contemporary Spatial Practices track) at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, where she serves as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Landscape Architecture. For the 2024-2025 academic year, she is a Doctoral Fellow with the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative.

 

Her dissertation project brings 'the planetary' in spatial research back down to earth - making legible the flows, spaces, and processes that constitute it - through a grounded study of the peripheries of pine biomass production in the Southeastern United States. It centers on the inherent paradoxes of urbanizing nature, raging across diverse subjects of the ecological uncanny in Georgia - feral dogs, pine plantations, mystery fish, military environmentalism (the list goes on). The strange and hybridized peripheries of the biomass industry relate the production of space (one of unmediated power, unquestioned and inescapable) to a total scalar upending of inherited metageographical assumptions in the planetary age. 

 

Simpson’s practice grounds itself in the Southeastern United States to consider how patterns of resource extraction based on uneven development internationally are replicated the set of inherited land and labor relationships distinct to the SEUS, vis-a-vis the logics of the plantation. She is broadly interested in environmental histories of energy transition where the contradictions of up-scaling social and ecological infrastructure surface unexpectedly. 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.

 

She is an ongoing contributor to Port Futures + Social Logistics and regularly publishes peer-reviewed enviro-spatial criticism. Methodologically, she works by getting lost alongside canine companion-collaborator, Boudreaux.

 

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I live between North Carolina and Cambridge, MA, USA. Portfolio, exhibition images, and press archive are available upon request: anniesimpson (at) gsd (dot) harvard (dot) edu. My CV is available here. 

 

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; Patti and Rusty Rueff Galleries, Purdue University; Atheneum, Athens, GA; The Carrack, Durham NC.

 

Previously, I worked alongside my companion-collaborator Mandy (honorary MFA from the University of Georgia, 2022). She was a very good dog.