about

Molly Catherine Briggs is a design historian, design theorist, and landscape artist whose research bridges scholarship with creative practice. She is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also co-represents the MFA Program in Graphic Design and Design for Responsible Innovation. Her writing and teaching focus on mediated spaces, mediated sensation and curation, representational epistemologies, and design research methodology. Her studio projects reflect on how we sense and make sense of the natural and artificial spaces we inhabit. Her dissertation, "The Panoramic Mode: Immersive Media and the Large Parks Movement" (2018), examines the emergence of large parks public park landscapes in Europe and the United States as an expression of a period media culture that synthesized overview with immersion. She holds a Ph.D. in Landscape Architecture History & Theory from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an M.F.A. in Printmaking from the Department of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University. Her creative work has been represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago since 2004.