Danielle Choi (MLA ’08) is the recipient of the 2016–2017 Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellowship in Landscape Architecture. The fellowship is awarded competitively on an annual basis at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and is intended to recognize and foster emerging design educators whose work embodies the potential for landscape as a medium of design in the public realm.
The Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellowship builds upon the GSD’s history of pedagogic innovation as well as the Department of Landscape Architecture’s century of leadership in landscape education. A jury composed of GSD landscape architecture faculty took part in the selection process, including current Kiley Fellow, Fionn Byrne.
Choi is currently a design critic in landscape architecture at the GSD, as well as a senior associate at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA). Since 2011, Choi has managed the Waller Creek project in Austin, Texas—the restoration of an urban creek and design of a new public realm. Prior to joining MVVA in 2009, Choi practiced landscape architecture in Berlin with TOPOTEK 1.
Choi has taught urban design studio at Columbia University, and she has been a visiting critic at the University of Virginia, Louisiana State University, Rutgers University, and the University of Illinois. She received a Bachelor of Arts in art history from the University of Chicago, and earned a Master in Landscape Architecture from GSD, where she received the Jacob Weidenmann graduation award for excellence in design.
Choi’s Kiley Fellowship proposal concerns the role of landscape architecture in the political economy of the built environment. Evidence of public disinvestment manifests in municipal crises and failure of infrastructure; landscape architects, as agents in the planning, design, and reconstruction of the public realm, are uniquely poised to assess urban vulnerabilities and their spatiotemporal relationships to environmental processes.