I’m an experimental geographer, filmmaker, and amateur shipwright. Rooted in an ethics of edge conditions, I use sight-/site-based investigation to track how certain places are consigned to the margins of environmental knowledge. I’m drawn to the representational paradigms, natrual history taxonomies, and lineages of marking and measuring that render particular landscapes off-limits or invisible. By building boats, riding cargo ships, and embedding myself in the logistical systems that structure contemporary life, my work generally focuses on operational zones and resource frontiers in the Southeastern US: toxic river corridors, freight lines, contested pipelines, capsized vessels, and military and carceral sites.
I recieved my doctorate from Harvard University, Graduate School of Design. For 2024-2025, I’m a Fellow with the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative. Recently, I convened the RealTimeNature conference at the Harvard GSD; “Void Almanac” was published in GeoHumanities; James Enos and I have a chapter in Post-Rational Visuality; Port Futures + Social Logistics is building towards its next summit in Groningen (NL) in the fall.
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 record, courses taught, published scholarship, etc – is available here. Portfolio, 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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My current project – in essays [The View from Nowhere] and an essay film [Under Story] – is an attempt to bring the planetary in spatial research back down to earth. A series of journeys follow pine trees as a planetary commodity shaped by the plantation legacy of the U.S. Southeast and as 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 the uneven geographies of extraction, labor, and circulation.
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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.