About Dr. Briggs
Molly Briggs
Molly Catherine Briggs is a design theorist, landscape historian, and studio practitioner whose research combines scholarship and creative practice. She teaches design theory, methods, and history with an emphasis on reading, representing, and reimagining the shape of built space and has served since 2019 as Coordinator of the MFA Program in Design for Responsible Innovation. Briggs holds a PhD in Landscape Architecture History & Theory from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA in Art Theory & Practice from Northwestern University. Her dissertation, The Panoramic Mode: Immersive Media and the Large Parks Movement (2018), examines the affiliation of large urban park landscapes in Europe and the United States with nineteenth-century virtual reality media.
Professor Briggs is the recipient of numerous scholarly, creative, and pedagogical grants, awards, and recognitions. She currently serves as Co-President of the International Panorama Council (Switzerland) and is a member of the College Art Association, the Design Research Society, the SECAC, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Magic Lantern Society (UK). She has been represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago since 2004.
Research Interests
The built environment, design history & theory, media history & theory, landscape representation, immersive media, spatial epistemologies, semiotics, visual culture