Catherine Seavitt

Catherine Seavitt is professor and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, where she holds the Martin and Margy Meyerson Chair of Urbanism. She is also co-executive director of The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania and creative director of LA+ Journal. 

Seavitt’s scholarship and design work examines the entanglement of public space and public health through the lens of ecology, policy, and novel plant science. She studies urban landscapes, post-industrial sites, toxicity, and inventive plant knowledge, with a focus on actionable responses to the climate crisis and decarbonization. She is interested in the possibilities of a multispecies and multiscalar approach to ecological knowledge and design, and the potential of incorporating indeterminate, collective, and nonbinary thinking in support of social, environmental, and multispecies justice.

A registered architect and landscape architect, Seavitt is a graduate of the Cooper Union and Princeton University, a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and Graham Foundation grants for research in Brazil. She serves as a member of the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Environmental Advisory Board. Seavitt previously served as Professor and Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture Program at the City College of New York.