Nico King is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher in modern landscape history, and a trained landscape designer. She is pursuing her doctorate in the Art History and Art Practice program at University of California, San Diego, where her work broadly focuses on speculative natures and utopian moments of the built landscape in a materialist perspective. As a specialization student in the study of human origins at the Center for Academic Research & Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA), she is interested in the evolution of human habitation. During the 2020-21 academic year, Nico is a recipient of the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Award as well as the Annette Merle-Smith Fellowship from CARTA. She holds and M.Sc. in Landscape Design from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU, 2012) and an art-based-research M.A in the Critical Studies program from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2016), following additional studies at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and at Cornell University. From 2012-2015, she was a pre-doctoral research associate in modern landscape design at BOKU Vienna. She held artist/architect residencies at SOMA Mexico (2019) and at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (2016-17). Before arriving in San Diego, she received the START Award for young architects and designers by the Austrian Federal Chancellery. Nico has published articles and book chapters on post-industrial mining landscapes; the ready-to-plant leisure garden in the culture industry; memory in the landscape; concepts of wilderness and nature; as well as the return of the political in park design.
