Paula Horrigan is a landscape architect now in the midst of a reset and realignment as she pivots towards visual arts as her primary form of expression. From art, her long-time influences include environmental and land art, book arts, and socially engaged art. From environmental design and landscape architecture they include placemaking, equity, community, and democratic design. She has long used ideas and landscape matter– topography, living and inert materials, natural and cultural ecologies– to design and construct artful landscapes that will nurture and sustain greater affection between people and place. Now, she is engaging with art making on smaller, more tangible and solitary scales.

Paula received her BA in Fine Arts and American Civilization from Brown University (1979) and her MLA in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University (1987). She is a licensed landscape architect in NY State and an Emerita Professor of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University where she taught for nearly 30 years. She is an elected Fellow of both the American Society of Landscape Architecture (ASLA) and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) and an editor of several books including, most recently, Fieldwork in Landscape Architecture: Methods, Actions, Tools (Routledge, 2024).

In 2022, Paula relocated to the American Southwest. In contrast to the more verdant northeastern landscapes with which she is most familiar, she is now discovering the vibrancy and resilience of Arizona’s high desert. She lives in Clarkdale, Arizona and works from her art studio in nearby Jerome. In January 2025 she will return to academia as a ‘late-in-life’ graduate student in Clark University’s low-residency MFA program.