Talia Greene

Climate justice works to acknowledge and reverse the disproportionate impacts of climate change, including pollution, dangerous heat, and flooding, on marginalized communities. For me, a dedication to climate justice means working to highlight these stories, exposing the impacts of a society built on a settler-colonialist philosophy and an extractive relationship to nature.

As a research-based artist, I approach projects through the lens of environmental and social justice, highlighting forgotten or ignored stories. In site-specific installations, I have used maps to depict urban growth and decreasing biodiversity, and have shown how maps promote inequality. In prints and cut paper sculptures, I have critiqued the idealization of 19th-century naturalists like Audubon and Thoreau. In 2024, I curated Voices from the Hill, a community-based environmental art project in East Los Angeles' El Sereno neighborhood. Collaborating with a neighborhood activist group, our goal was to change the narrative surrounding a disputed urban green space. The performance led visitors through distressed sections of the hillside and culminated in a regenerated area, envisioning a future where a protected Elephant Hill welcomes humans, birds, and wildlife to coexist.

As an educator, I am interested in facilitating conversations about the role of creativity in addressing current issues such as climate justice. Working from a fine art perspective within a design school raises compelling questions for me about the intersection between art, communication and design: What impact does an artist’s point of view have in framing a conversation, and how does that differ from a designer, engineer, or historian’s? How can cross disciplinary collaborations facilitate deeper questions and solutions to the problems of our time? My course "Research Based Exhibits," developed for the MS in Design Research program in 2024, was a first step towards investigating some of those questions in the classroom.