David Buckley Borden, an Associate Research Professor within the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Oregon, is an interdisciplinary designer, visual artist, and educator working at the intersection of art, design, and ecology. Informed by research and community engagement, David promotes a shared environmental awareness and heightened cultural value of ecology. David’s place-based projects highlight both pressing environmental issues and everyday phenomena. Using an accessible, often humorous, combination of visual art and landscape design, David’s work manifests in a variety of forms, ranging from site-specific public art installations in the woods to data-driven cartography in the gallery.

As a Harvard Forest Associate and Designer-in-Residence at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, David regularly collaborates with Long Term Ecological Research scientists to champion a cultural ecology supported by interdisciplinary environmental-communication. David also currently serves as a Senior Advisor of Creative Practice and Innovation at the Center for the Future of Forests and Society at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry. David’s creative practice is supported by his critical writing with research scientists including recent co-authored work in MIT’s Leonardo Journal, Arnodlia, Boston Art Review, Ground Up, and the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies. In support of David’s public facing projects, his collaborations have been featured in a wide variety of media outlets ranging from Landscape Architecture Magazine, Hyperallergic, Orion Magazine, Arnoldia, and NPR’s Living on Earth.

David studied landscape architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and worked as a designer at Sasaki before focusing his social practice at the intersection of landscape, creativity, and cultural event. David continues to periodically work with landscape architecture firms as a consultant, including recent collaborations with Agency Landscape + Planning, Sasaki, and Rios. David is a 2024-2025 Fellow in Innovation and Leadership at the Landscape Architecture Foundation where he explores the question, “How can science-communication be reimagined as a collaborative design process between landscape architects and research scientists at long-term ecological research sites?”