Anne Whiston Spirn

Anne Whiston Spirn is an author, landscape architect, photographer, and teacher. Her books include the award-winning Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field (2008), The Language of Landscape (1998), and The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (1984) and the forthcoming book, The Eye Is a Door: Photography and the Art of Visual Thinking. Spirn is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses on urban design and on photography. Prior to her appointment at MIT, she taught at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. Spirn has directed The West Philadelphia Landscape Project (www.wplp.net) since 1987, and is currently writing a book that describes that work, a project for which she received a Guggenheim fellowship. For more information, see www.annewhistonspirn.com.