Elise Misao Hunchuck

Visiting Scholar

Elise Misao Hunchuck (she/her) is a researcher, editor, writer, artist, and educator who thinks and writes about landscapes and catastrophes (fast and slow) and the gap between event and understanding.

Trained in landscape architecture, philosophy, and geography at the University of Toronto, her practice moves between fieldwork, cartography, photography, and text, accumulating knowledge slowly and across scales. Her research is expressed across multiple forms and has been included in international exhibitions, among them the Shanghai Biennale and the Madrid Biennial. Her research sites span Canada, Japan, the Arctic, and Ukraine, and her methods follow accordingly: close observation, archival work, and the kinds of collaborative, long-term attention that landscapes seem to demand.

Her editorial and curatorial practice runs in parallel and in the same spirit. From 2021 to 2025, she served as Editor and Curator at transmediale, Berlin’s annual festival for art and digital culture, where she shaped the festival’s discourse programme around questions of media, ecology, AI, and planetary-scale change. She is an editorial board member of Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy, and co-editor, with Bert de Jonghe, of Arctic Practices (Actar Publishers). Her writing and editorial projects have appeared in The Avery Review, The Funambulist, Flash Art, MIT Press, Sternberg Press, PUNCH, and elsewhere. She has lectured internationally at universities, festivals, and cultural institutions across Europe, North America, and Asia.

Hunchuck holds a visiting position at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), and has previously taught at the Bartlett, the Royal College of Art, and the Daniels Faculty at the University of Toronto. She is a 2026 Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. Her research has been supported on two occasions by the Graham Foundation and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

At Carleton, Hunchuck teaches the second half of ARCH 5115: Civil Twilight in Svalbard (the first half was taught by Zach Colbert), a graduate design studio that learns with the Arctic archipelago as a site for rethinking how architecture and landscape practice engage conditions of environmental extremity and deep time. The studio is as much an epistemological project as a design one, asking students to work at the edges of what can be measured, mapped, and imagined.