Katie Jenkins is a Design Critic in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and artist-in-residence at the MacLeish Field Station at Smith College. Previously, she held faculty appointments at The Ohio State University and Cornell University.
She practices ecological transformation and repair—replacing sameness with abundance and fostering multi-species connections where there are none. Her book, A Meadow Made by Walking(forthcoming, Filbert Press), documents the transformation of a former soybean field in central Ohio through a practice of walking that is also a kind of land stewardship. Her articles on walking as a design practice have appeared in the Journal of Landscape Architecture (2018) and Landscape Architecture Magazine (2020).
With Present Practice, she excavated an asphalt lot and grew Prairie with Nine Rooms, in which over fifty species spring from sand and recycled asphalt shards. She has led design studios on the repair of asphalt sites, urban construction lots and decommissioned quarries and written about the relationship of plants to rock and rubble in Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes (2018) and the forthcoming edited volume, Familiar Landscapes.
As a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, she used self-seeded urban vegetation to produce a series of monotype prints that visualize ecological relationships and document moments of spontaneous repair. A selection of these prints were exhibited at a83 gallery in 2025. She has since expanded her ecological printmaking practice, making site-specific prints with vegetation collected from the landscapes that she designs and labors in.
She is a recipient of the Center for Land Use Interpretation Residency, the MacDowell Fellowship in Architecture, and the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture. With Present Practice, she was profiled in Metropolis Magazine. She has a B.A. in painting and printmaking from Yale University and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia.