The McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design is thrilled to announce the appointment of our 2026-2027 McHarg Fellow, Shurui Zhang.
Shurui is a landscape architect and researcher based in Queens, New York. Her work follows plants and people as they move together, exploring how migration, care, and labor shape landscapes across scales, from the land to the body. Her current research project, "Where Are You From From? Asian Vegetables and Chinese Diasporic Foodways," traces Asian produce from farms across the American Northeast to Chinese restaurants in New York City, examining the logistics, agricultural landscapes, and cultural relationships that sustain diasporic food networks.
Shurui is co-authoring a forthcoming book, Solarpunk Landscape: Towards Radical Sustainability, which explores alternative environmental narratives and the role of landscape architecture in imagining actionable ways to live in a more-than-human world. Previously, she was a Virginia Sea Grant Fellow working on the Virginia Coastal Resilience Master Plan and worked as an Urban Designer at WXY. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design in Fall 2025. She holds a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a dual Master of Landscape Architecture / Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia.
Shurui will follow our extraordinary 2025-2026 Fellow, Tami Banh. Join us in celebrating Tami's research and teaching on Thursday, April 23rd at 6:30pm in the Kleinman Energy Forum as she presents the work of her fellowship year, "Shared Waters, Divided Landscapes," with a public lecture and exhibition.
We’re looking forward to the year ahead as Shurui joins the Weitzman community!
McHarg Fellowship
The McHarg Fellowship is a teaching and research award given by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology to an emerging voice in landscape architecture. The purpose of the Fellowship is to create a unique opportunity for an emerging professional and/or academic who would benefit most from support to conduct research, to teach, and to be mentored by faculty during the term of the Fellowship. The Fellowship is awarded competitively on an annual basis and the selected fellow is expected to be in residence at Penn full-time for one academic year
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