Sean Burkholder

Sean Burkholder is Andrew Gordon Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture.  Prior to joining the School of Design he was an assistant professor of landscape and urban design at the University of Buffalo. He is also the director of the Landscape Affairs Group, a Landscape Research and Design consultancy focused on the human-entangled freshwater ecosystems of postindustrial regions. The relationship of these issues and their experiential understanding are being explored in a forthcoming book authored by himself and Karen Lutsky titled: Curious Methods (University of Pittsburgh Press 2019). Sean is also co-directing the $1.5m Healthy Port Futures project from the Great Lakes Protection Fund in close collaboration with a range of local and federal agencies. This project stresses the inherent value of landscape design research in the process of maritime infrastructure projects that typically aim only at single-value outcomes. Underpinning all of this work is a particular interest in the way in which substrate and ecology influence the urban landscape and how these systems are interpreted by others.

Sean lectures and serves as a design critic internationally and his work has been published widely in books and journals including The Third Coast Atlas (Actar 2017), Places Journal, The Journal of Landscape Architecture, The Journal of Landscape Research, CLOG and others. Sean holds an undergraduate degree in Architecture from Miami University and a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Sean leads the leads the EMLab working group with Karen M’Closkey and Keith VanDerSys.