JENNY PRICE

Jenny Price is a public writer, artist, and environmental historian. In 2016-17, she is a Tauber Foundation Fellow and a Visiting Research Associate at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University-St. Louis.

Since 1998, she has engaged essential questions about environmental ideas and public space, in formats that have included essays, talks, classes, tours, installations, and interactive public art events.

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Author of Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A. and Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, she’s written about public space, environment, Los Angeles, and gun violence for the NY Times, LA Times, WA Post, GOOD, and Believer, and has written the Green Me Up, JJ occasional not-quite advice column on LA Observed.

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As a co-founder of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers public art collective in 2004, she has co-created such projects as Water Bar & Happy Hour—with a tasting of both public and bottled waters—and a Public Access 101 series that has included the projects Malibu Public Beaches and Downtown LA. The Rangers have exhibited or been a resident artist at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the Orange County Museum of Art’s California Biennial, the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, and the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

She designed Nature Trail in 2012-13—an interpretive route that includes stops at power lines and restrooms—as a permanent commission for Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis.

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She co-created the mobile-phone app Our Malibu Beaches in 2013, and updates it regularly as a guide to everything you need to know to find and use a public beach in Malibu.

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She has an A.B. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University, and has taught at UCLA, USC, Antioch-L.A., and Princeton. She lectures and leads workshops widely in and out of academia, on a wide range of topics that have included “what arts and humanities are good for,” “the art of sustainability,” environment and humor (seriously), the ongoing revitalization of L.A.’s concrete river, and the equally ongoing Malibu beach wars.

A former Guggenheim Fellow and NEH Fellow, she has been a Research Scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (1998-2014), a Senior Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, a Visiting Scholar at the Bill Lane Center of the American West at Stanford University, and a Mellon Tri-College Creative Residencies artist. She held several visiting positions at Princeton University 2011-2015: the Barron Visiting Professor in Environment and the Humanities, the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies, and Atelier Program guest artist.

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She is working on a new book — Stop Saving the Planet!: A 12-Step Guide for 21st-Century Environmentalists.