Yufan Gao is Core Faculty in the School of Landscape Architecture and Curator of Exhibitions at Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ. She is also the Co-Founder of Studio Gao-Byun. With a background in sculpture and textile design, she draws on the immersive, meditative, and embodied processes of making—spatializing ideas through material and rhythm—in her work as a landscape architect, curator, and educator.
Her practice, teaching, and research explore the nuanced relationships between nature and non-nature, landscape and architecture, and the traces of time that shape place, engaging form as motion and motion as form. She focuses on found landscapes—spaces beyond traditional paradigms that hold latent aesthetic, ecological, and cultural value—and investigates how motion and stillness, bodily and cinematic, can generate new spatial understandings and transform landscape perception. She recently completed an artist residency at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where she examined landscape as a participatory medium and memorialization as a living process of motion and memory.
Yufan is a licensed landscape architect with eight years of experience at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and Mikyoung Kim Design. She holds an MLA from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a BA in Textiles from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Cornell University. Since 2018, she has taught across the Schools of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, leading design studios from introductory to advanced levels, architecture thesis, and elective courses. Her pedagogy emphasizes creative approaches to design education, drawing on curatorial thinking to transform intuitive observations into structured insights and fostering the collaborative production of knowledge among students and faculty across disciplines.