Nico King
Email:
nking@ucsd.edu
Website:
https://cargocollective.com/nico-king
Biography:
Nicole Theresa King is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher in modern landscape history, and a trained landscape designer. She is a PhD candidate in visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, where her research focuses broadly on political ecologies, the designed landscape, and speculative natures. As a specialization student in the study of human origins at the Center for Academic Research & Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA), she is also interested in the role of plants and gardens in the evolution of human habitation.
Nico was a Wilbur R. Jacobs Fellow and a Mellon Fellow at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens (2023–24) and the recipient of a Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship in Landscape Architecture from the Department of Fine + Applied Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (2020-2). She has held art/architecture residencies at SOMA Mexico (2019) and at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (2016-17). Prior to arriving in San Diego, she received the START Award for Young Architects and Designers from the Austrian Federal Chancellery (2017-18). Her publications include articles and book chapters on post-industrial mining landscapes (jovis, 2014, and IUAV, 2012), “ready-to-plant” leisure gardens as the culture industry of landscape (Metroverlag, 2014), and on parks as monuments (Callwey, 2015), their social design ideals (Edward Elgar, 2018), and political dimensions (Stadt+Grün, 2018).
From 2012-2015, Nico was a post-graduate research associate at BOKU Vienna on the history of landscape architecture in the twentieth century, with a focus on its female pioneers. Between 2009 and 2013 she worked as a project-based landscape designer and garden architect in offices between Vienna and Berlin.
Nico holds an M.Sc. in Landscape Design from the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU, 2012, with distinction of excellence) and an art-based-research M.A. from the Critical Studies program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2016, with distinction of excellence), after additional studies toward these degrees at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem (Israel), Wageningen University (Netherlands) and at Cornell University (NY, USA).
At UCSD, her research was supported by numerous sources. Nico has received CARTA fellowship (2020-2022), including an Annette Merle-Smith Award, for the highest level of achievement in the graduate specialization, Dita and Erwin Gumpel Jewish Studies Endowed Fellowship (2023-24) and an artist project grant by the Russell Foundation in 2024. She also received a Tinker Field Research Travel Grant from the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies (CILAS) and the Tinker Foundation in 2019-2020, and a summer graduate teaching scholarship from the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor (2023), a Frieda Daum Urey Academic Fellowship from Oceanids (2023), a GFI Graduate Fellowship from the Dean’s Office of Graduate Studies (2021), a Graduate Research Award from the International Institute, a Ruth Newmark Award from the International Center, and a Summer Award from the Institute of Arts and Humanities (all 2019).
