Join us for a conversation with MacArthur Fellows Jeanne Gang, J. Drew Lanham and Elizabeth Turk on how art, design and literature can help create healthier habitats for people and wildlife.
Realigning with Nature: A Conversation with MacArthur Fellows
David Rubenstein Treehouse at Harvard University. Photo by Jason O’Rear, courtesy of Studio Gang.
How can art, design and literature deepen connections between people and nature and help foster flourishing habitats for all?
MacArthur Fellows Jeanne Gang, J. Drew Lanham and Elizabeth Turk will explore this question through conversations about how cultural narratives shape the ways people respond to the natural world, how cities can support bird and other wildlife populations, and how creative practices can inspire community action for environmental change.
These themes connect to CAC’s ongoing exhibition, Flyway City: Architecture for a Flourishing Ecosystem, designed and co-curated by Studio Gang. The exhibition highlights approaches to creating healthier urban habitats and addressing bird collisions with building glass, a problem that kills more than 1 billion birds each year in the United States.
More on our speakers:
- Architect Jeanne Gang, founding partner of Studio Gang, designs places that strengthen relationships among people, communities, and the natural environment. She is a leading practitioner and advocate for bird-safe design and improving biodiversity in cities.
- Writer, ornithologist, and conservationist J. Drew Lanham strives to connect ecological research to cultural narratives and lived experiences. His work situates scientific knowledge within personal and historical contexts, broadening how audiences engage with conservation.
- Sculptor Elizabeth Turk makes marble works that explore fragility and resilience in the natural world. Her series Echoes of Extinction, created with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, transforms the calls of endangered and extinct birds into sound sculptures that memorialize species loss and prompt reflection on coexistence.
- Moderator Alison Cuddy is a Chicago-based writer, interviewer and cultural producer exploring art, architecture, and the natural world. She regularly leads conversations with writers and thinkers, among them Amy Tan, Margaret Atwood, Rachel Maddow, Al Gore and Michael Pollan.
This program is made possible through the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Defying Boundaries: MacArthur Fellows at 45
This moment calls for creative courage. For 45 years, MacArthur Fellows have expanded the boundaries of possibility by questioning conventions, crossing disciplines, and driving collective progress. Throughout 2026, the Foundation is celebrating the groundbreaking work of the Fellows and inspiring public dialogue through a series of nationwide events and conversations.
Learn more at macfound.org/fellows-45.
Keynote speaker
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Speakers:
Architect Jeanne Gang is the founding partner of international architecture and urban design practice Studio Gang. Known for a distinctive design approach that expands beyond architecture’s conventional boundaries, she creates striking places that strengthen connections between people, their communities, and nature. Her diverse portfolio across the Americas and Europe includes the Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History; a new United States Embassy in Brazil; and an expansion of the Clinton Presidential Center. A MacArthur Fellow and the Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Jeanne has been named one of TIME Magazine’s most influential people in the world.
J. Drew Lanham is a cultural ornithologist, naturalist, educator, and writer using robust science, artful essays, and evocative oratory to color the conservation conversation. Guided by principles of interconnectedness and interdependence, Dr. Lanham’s work centers on the growing issues within environmental justice as observed through the multifaceted perspective of a Black Southern man. As a storyteller, poet, and passionate advocate for accessibility and stewardship, his writing is in praise of wandering and wildness and in protest against all not justice or joy.
Lanham is a Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University. He has received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant (2022) as well as the Dan W. Lufkin Conservation Award from the National Audubon Society (2019), the Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs Outstanding Service Award from the North American Association for Environmental Education (2016), and the E. O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation from the Center for Biological Diversity (2020) and the Thoreau Award in 2024. He served as the Poet Laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina (2022).
A native Californian, Elizabeth Turk is an artist known for sculpture and through ET Projects, immersive art events. Turk received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Rinehart School of Sculpture in 1994 and her BA from Scripps College, Claremont, CA in 1983. She is a MacArthur Fellow, an Annalee & Barnett Newman Foundation recipient and a Smithsonian Artist Fellow among notable other awards. She has been represented by Hirschl & Adler Modern in NYC since 2000.
Launching ET Projects as a California 501(c)(3) enables Turk to develop social sculptures beyond existing art-world boundaries and make them freely accessible to the public. Through collaboration with local communities, she develops flash art events around environmental issues. The recent sculpture series, Echoes of Extinction, captures the ephemeral; the sound of voices on the edge of vanishing forever. Turk’s compositions— these sound columns— translate the aural into the visual, building sound in a silent structure, giving individual loss an indestructible memorial. Immortality. The rhythm and richness to the patterns of each distinctive birdsong becomes a recognizable chorus as a collection of totems.
Alison Cuddy is a Chicago-based writer, interviewer and cultural producer. Her features exploring art, architecture and the natural world appear in the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Newcity Magazine, NPR and WBEZ. She regularly leads conversations with writers and thinkers, among them Amy Tan, Margaret Atwood, Rachel Maddow, Al Gore and Michael Pollan and has hosted and created podcast series including Library for the People, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Chicago Public Library. For over a decade she was a host and reporter at WBEZ Chicago and is the former Artistic Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. She develops creative projects for various clients including the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Illinois Humanities and Walder Foundation. In 2019 she was appointed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot to co-chair the City of Chicago’s Cultural Advisory Council and currently serves on the board of the Arts Club of Chicago.
The Living Orders of Venice. Photo by Tom Harris, courtesy of Studio Gang.
Echoes of Extinction by Elizabeth Turk. Photo courtesy of Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
Kresge College Residential Building at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Photo by Jason O’Rear, courtesy of Studio Gang.
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