Elise Misao Hunchuck (b. tkaronto/Toronto, CA), MLA (Daniels, Toronto), is a spatial researcher, editor, curator, writer, and educator trained in landscape architecture, philosophy, and geography. Her practice—spatial research, curatorial work, editorial production, pedagogy—is careful and sometimes slow by necessity and by principle: a practice of solidarity through attention, showing up season after season to the same coastlines while developing a shared archive that belongs to no single discipline or institution. Based between Berlin and Milan, her fieldwork spans Canada, the United States, Japan, and Ukraine. She is currently completing An Incomplete Atlas of Stones, a book manuscript on tsunami warning monuments in Japan; a multi-national curatorial project; and editing two forthcoming volumes (Danish Architectural Press and Punch Books).
Elise was a visiting adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (New York) in the M.S. Advanced Architectural Design program (2021–2025). Previously, she was a senior researcher and lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture in London (2019–2021) and, alongside Marco Ferrari and Jingru Cyan Cheng, co-led the multi-year research project ADS7 (2019–2021), an investigation into the politics of the atmosphere. She has been the Distinguished Visiting Critic at Carleton University Architecture School (2019, 2021, 2026) and a visiting assistant professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto (2021). She is an editorial board member of Scapegoat Journal: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy since 2017, and between 2021 and 2024, served as editor and festival curator for transmediale, the festival for digital art and culture in Berlin.
Her writing and editorial work have been published with The Funambulist, Flash Art, Fotograf, The Architectural Review, Damaged Goods, Jovis Verlag, Lenz Press, MIT Press, Onassis Foundation, Spector Books, Sternberg Press, and Whitechapel London. Recent editorial projects include Arctic Practices, co-edited with Bert de Jonghe (Actar, 2025); The AI Anarchies Book, co-edited with Clara Herrmann (Akademie der Künste, Berlin); Radical Rituals Part II, co-edited with Berta Gutiérrez Casaos and Alkistis Thomidou (Punch Books); and Living Surfaces, as English language editor for Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka (MIT Press).Previous editorial projects include Electric Brine (Archive Books, 2021); Operational Images, as English-language editor for Jussi Parikka (University of Minnesota Press, 2023); and transmediale journals 5 through 7, among others.
Hunchuck has been selected from a field of 4,063 candidates as one of fifty-five 2024–2026 Fellows (spatial, architecture, and design) at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, DE). Her artistic work and research have been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG).
