The College of Design and the Department of Landscape Architecture is celebrating a well-deserved award obtained by Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, Liska Chan, who earned a spot in the upcoming 2026-27 Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership. Chan joins five other mid-career and senior-level LAF fellows in the upcoming cohort. Each fellow will receive a $25,000 award and will dedicate 12 weeks to pursuing a proposed project during the service term. Chan's project is called The Politics of Surface: Feminist Approaches to Fashion, Landscape, and Spatial Practice, and will explore how fashion films, campaigns, and runway shows use landscapes to shape our perceptions concerning climate change, nature, and the body.
In her project, Chan proposes that these "striking settings often make the environmental crisis feel dramatic or beautiful while obscuring questions of labor, ecology, and power" and will utilize a feminist and environmental theory lens to examine the staging in fashion media, asking if they are creating visibility or erasure when it comes to the stories and relationships of the land. Chan will postulate and create alternative images that will reimagine how fashion might engage with landscapes intentionally, ethically, and relationally.
The fellowship will consist of the project work, with support from a number of different exploratory activities including facilitated discussions, critiques, intergenerational mentorship, and explorations of transformational leadership, all to occur during three 3-day residencies. The 2026-2027 fellowship year will commence in May and conclude in May/June 2027 with a final symposium to showcase their work. LAF is proud to make this investment in people and ideas that will drive the future of landscape architecture, and we look forward to working with the cohort as they tackle important challenges. The College of Design and the School of Architecture & Environment are sim