Nico King
Nicole Theresa King is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher whose practice bridges modern landscape history, design speculation, and materialist ecological thought. Her current work examines the environmental aesthetics and crisis imaginaries of Southern California in the twentieth century. The research asks how horticultural design, leisure infrastructures, and colonial ecologies produced a modernist paradigm that fused image and infrastructure into environmental imaginaries. It examines how these forms unravel the politics of nature in the Anthropocene amid contemporary ecological distress.
Nico’s work challenges landscape as medium, material, and infrastructure. Trained in art- and design-based research, Nico holds an MLA/M.Sc. in Landscape Architecture from BOKU Vienna (2012, with distinction of excellence), where her thesis examined Johannesburg’s post-industrial gold mine dumps as novel urban infrastructures, tracing their material and symbolic toxic legacy within apartheid urbanisms and conceptualizations of nature. A second master’s thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (MA 2012, with distinction of excellence) investigated the spatial politics of Shoah memory in post-Nazi Austria in comparison to Israel. Whereas postwar Austria reconstituted itself as victimized nation despite its role as perpetrator, Israel emerged as survivor state. This contrast provided a lens for analyzing how the presence and absence of evidence shapes public monuments and materialities of memory.
She is currently completing her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a concentration in Art Practice at UC San Diego, with a parenthetical degree in the study of human origins. Prior to arriving in San Diego, she received the START Award for Young Architects and Designers from the Austrian Federal Chancellery (2017-18). Her residencies include SOMA Mexico (2019) and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (2016-17). Nico was an ifk Junior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna at the University for Art and Design Linz (2025; 2025-26). She was a Wilbur R. Jacobs Fellow and a Mellon Fellow at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California (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 (2020-21). In 2025-26, Nico is a guest scholar at Humboldt University Berlin’s Cluster of Excellence "Matters of Activity: Image. Space. Material." as well as the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Munich University.
Publications include articles and book chapters on post-industrial mining landscapes (jovis, 2014; IUAV, 2012), crisis technologies in Southern California gardens (ifk now, 2025), the culture industry of horticulture (Metroverlag, 2014), and parks as monuments, social design ideals, and political ground (Callwey, 2015; Edward Elgar, 2018; Stadt+Grün, 2018).
EDUCATION
2026, PhD
University of California, San Diego
San Diego, CA, United States
2016, MA
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Vienna, Austria
2012, MLA/MSc
BOKU University
Vienna, Austria
JURY
Andreas Fogarasi
Gabu Heindl
Catrin Lorch
Beatrix Ruf
Christoph Thun-Hohenstein
FINAL PROJECT
