bio
Andy Lee’s film and academic work engages contemporary conceptions and mediations of the American landscape as a method for the remediation of the earth under the climate crisis. Films, landscapes themselves, become modes of radical planetary action. His research engages a series of films produced by the Department of the Interior during the Cold War and screened throughout the Global South as a part of their large-scale infrastructure-building civilian aid missions during the time. These (e)motion pictures produced an aesthetic and deeply emotional sensing of US infrastructural projects: haptic embodiments of American consumerism. US-built infrastructures in the Global South became forms of desire, fantasy, and fetish. Andy’s current work takes a queer orientation of the cinematic body and explores the films’ instructive potential in the construction of a Cold War planetary aesthetic for our own forms of planetary action today. Lee is the current Fellow in Architectural Activism at the University of Wisconsin and the Charles Eliot Traveling Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. They have recently been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, and presented work on the formation of a global Picturesque at MoMA’s Third Ecology Conference, hosted in Reykjavik by the Icelandic University for the Arts and EAHN, at the School of Athens in a Athens Greece, and at the Technical University of Monterrey in Queretaro, Mexico. They hold a Master of Landscape Architecture and a Master of Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate school of Design.