UPENN PhD Architecture is happy to communicate that 2021 Alum Miranda Mote, has been awarded the 2023-24 Garden Club of America / Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture. As a fellow in residence at the American Academy in Rome, she will be focused on archival work related to the history of nature printing in Italy as it was brought to Philadelphia before 1720. Her project consists in making a narrative series of botanical prints about the Rome Sustainable Food Project gardens of the Academy in Rome, and working with children of the Academy and local schools teaching and developing art based, literacy and botany lessons for her Botanography curriculum. The work is based on Miranda’s Ph.D. dissertation, titled “Reading and Writing a Garden, Materials of a Garden Made in Germantown, Philadelphia (1683-1719), which addressed the primary significance of poetry, language, and belief in colonial American garden culture.
Miranda is an historian, artist, and educator based in Philadelphia. She graduated with a BArch from University of Cincinnati (1995), MDes in History and Philosophy of Design from Graduate School of Design, Harvard University (2015), and PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture, UPENN (2021). She has taught at Temple University, Pratt Institute, and in the undergraduate program in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. As an artist, Miranda has developed nature printing techniques based on her historical research about the poetics of botanical image making. Her work with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities in 2021 led to her establishing Botanography as a non-profit dedicated to an arts-focused, literacy and botany K-12 curriculum and designs of garden classrooms as productive, imaginative, and healthy environments for teaching in urban neighborhoods. She believes that every school should have a garden classroom and that literacy is fundamental to equitable urban landscapes.
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