Samantha Solano

/ RESEARCHER / designer / educator /

Samantha Solano is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She teaches graduate and undergraduate studios and advanced representation courses. She is the founding principal of JUXTOPOS, a co-founder of the Visualizing Equity in Landscape Architecture (VELA) project, and a co-collaborator of the International Landscape Collaborative (ILC). Samantha is a licensed Landscape Architect in the state of Utah. 

Samantha’s scholarship engages with revealing unrepresented narratives overlooked throughout landscape architecture discourse. Her work interrogates two main streams—arid territories and the social, political, and cultural values that have led to the mismanagement of desert lands, and the empowerment of design, environmental, and racial justice narratives in practice, the profession, and the academy. Her research and design methodologies are centered on using critical mapping as a means of revealing un-recognized, un-formalized, and un-represented relationships hidden throughout the landscape. 

Samantha’s research has been published in Representing Landscape: Analogue, From the South: Global Perspectives on Landscape and Territory, and T-Squared: Theories and Tactics in Architecture and Design (forthcoming). Currently she is a co-editor of the ILC’s 2nd research volume focusing on territorial landscape approaches deployed throughout Northern and Arctic territories. 

Samantha previously held faculty appointments at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She holds the Master in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor in Landscape Architecture from UNLV.