Brenda Brown

Educated in sculpture as well as landscape architecture, American-Canadian Brenda Brown does work spanning design, art, and research, but it always concerns landscapes – landscapes as expressions of ecosystem structures and functions, landscapes as experience and idea. Born in Maryland, she has also lived in Virginia, Massachusetts, Iowa, Illinois, California, Florida, and, for the past 13 years, in Winnipeg, Canada, where she teaches landscape architecture and environmental design at the University of Manitoba. Since 2004 Brown has been particularly concerned with how sounds can reveal landscapes and landscapes can reveal sounds. These interests led to a 2004 pilot project, MacDowell Listening Trails, followed by sound trails in Oregon and Florida; interior and exterior site-specific sound and video installations in 2010 documenting Winnipeg’s spring river ice break-up; a video, Hearing the Wind: Chaco Canyon, part of her 2018 exhibit at Chaco Culture National Historical Park; and an ongoing hummingbird habitat restoration project at Tzintzuntzan, a national archaeological site in Michoacán, Mexico, a project encompassing a major multi-media exhibition at Morelia’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo—Alfredo Zalce and at the archaeological site itself in 2015. She designed and edited the exhibit’s catalogue, Tzintzuntzan, el luger de los colibríes – otra vez/Tzintzuntzan, place of the hummingbirds – again whose contributors include composers, archaeologists, ecologists, an ornithologist, an art historian, an architect, and Brown herself. Her collaborations have involved (among others) composers Richard Festinger, Michael Matthews and Yehudi Infante, restoration ecologist Roberto Lindig-Cisneros, and lighting designer Linnaea Tillett. With Terry Harkness and Douglas Johnston she organized the national traveling exhibit, “Eco-Revelatory Design: Nature Constructed / Nature Revealed” and was editor of that exhibit’s catalog, a special expanded issue of Landscape Journal. The exhibit closed at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2000, and won an American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Merit Award in Communications in 1999. Her other writings have been published in Landscape Journal, Landscape Architecture, Landscapes/Paysages, and Center. Brenda Brown won the ASLA's Bradford Williams Award in 2002. She has been a fellow at MacDowell, Ucross, Yaddo, Caldera, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Riding Mountain National Park. She was a finalist for the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture in 2003 and 2004.