I’m an experimental geographer, filmmaker, and amateur shipwright. I primarily work via sight-/site-based investigation to make videos, photographs, and essays. I moonlight as a doctoral candidate (ABD, Criticism & Contemporary Spatial Practices track) at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, where I also teach in the Department of Landscape Architecture. For the 2024-2025 academic year, I’m a Doctoral Fellow with the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative.
Recently, I convened the RealTimeNature conference at the Harvard GSD; “Void Almanac” was published with GeoHumanities; James Enos and I have a chapter coming out 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.
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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, making legible the flows, spaces, and processes that constitute it. A series of journeys follow pine trees as a planetary commodity shaped by the Southeastern United States’ plantation legacy and a contested node in "green energy" transition. Broadly conceived as a study of the peripheries of pine biomass production in the region, the work cracks open dominant visual and economic paradigms [fragmentation, concealment, and reclassification] that obscure the uneven geographies of extraction, labor, and circulation.
Centering on diverse subjects of the ecological uncanny in Georgia – feral dogs, pine plantations, mystery fish, military environmentalism (the list goes on) – the project traces how environmental knowledge about landscapes of production/circulation are produced/communicated: the fundamental cartographic scaffolds, technical processes, representational tools, theoretical assumptions, and geographic norms that organize the “natural” and built world.
Mostly, my 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. I’m particularly interested in environmental histories of energy transition where the contradictions of up-scaling social and ecological infrastructure surface unexpectedly. Methodologically, I work by getting lost alongside my canine companion-collaborator, Boudreaux.
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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; Patti and Rusty Rueff Galleries, Purdue University; 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 companion-collaborator Mandy (honorary MFA from the University of Georgia, 2022). She was a very good dog.