Faculty

Profile

Christopher Kennedy is the associate director at the Urban Systems Lab at The New School and lecturer in the Parsons School of Design. As an artist and scholar, Kennedy’s research explores the social-ecological benefits of urban plant communities, multispecies thinking, and community-based approaches to environmental stewardship and environmental art. 

As artist-designer Kennedy creates site-specific projects that examine conventional notions of “Nature,” interspecies agency, and biocultural collaboration. Drawing from a background in environmental engineering, Kennedy re-imagines field science techniques and new forms of storytelling to develop embodied research, installations, sculptures, and publications that recontextualize social-ecological systems. Kennedy has worked collaboratively on projects shown at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the Levine Museum of the New South, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, the Ackland Art Museum and the Queens Museum. Kennedy holds a B.S. in Environmental Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a M.A. in Environmental Conservation Education from NYU, and a PhD in Education and Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina.

Degrees Held

B.S. in Environmental Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

M.A. in Environmental Conservation Education from NYU

PhD in Education and Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina

Professional Affiliation

Ecological Society of America

Central Texas Mycological Society

Research Interests

Urban Ecology, Spontaneous Urban Plants, Bioremediation, Ecological Justice and Art, Community Science, Climate Change