Elise Misao Hunchuck

Elise Misao (操) Hunchuck (she/her) is a writer, editor, curator, and artist whose work traces the marks people leave in the landscape to carry warnings or memories across time. Born in Toronto/Canada, of Japanese, French, and Ukrainian descent, she trained first in philosophy and geography and then in landscape architecture at the University of Toronto, studying under Jane Wolff. She now works between Berlin/Germany and Milan/Italy.

For more than a decade, she has been assembling the Incomplete Atlas of Stones, a fieldwork survey of the tsunami markers set along the coasts of Japan. The same attention of deliberation and care runs through the rest of her work – hunger stones that surface in European rivers, flood lines cut into embankments, and the politics of the atmosphere by way of cloud and sky river studies (shown at the Shanghai Biennale, at ZKM Karlsruhe under Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, and at the Madrid Biennial, in collaboration with Marco Ferrari and Jingru Cyan Cheng).

Her recent projects span the exhibition, the page, and the festival. She designed and curated Oceanic Refractions for the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, an immersive work of screen, scent, and sound. For five years, through 2025, she was curator and editor at transmediale in Berlin. And with Bert De Jonghe, she most recently co-edited Arctic Practices: Design for a Changing World (Actar, 2025). Alongside her own writing, she has been a longtime editor for the philosopher and media theorist Jussi Parikka and a board member of the Scapegoat journal. Her written and editorial work has appeared with Archive Books, Duke University Press, MIT Press, the University of Minnesota Press, Edinburgh University Press, Bloomsbury, Sternberg Press, Lars Müller Publishers, PUNCH, and Whitechapel Gallery, and in journals and magazines including The Architectural Review, The Avery Review, The Funambulist, FLASH Art, Centre Canadien d’Architecture (CCA), and Scapegoat.

She has taught architecture and landscape architecture at Columbia University (New York City/USA), the Royal College of Art (London/United Kingdom), the Bartlett at the University College of London, the University of Toronto, and Carleton University (Ottawa/Canada). She holds Graham Foundation grants from 2022 and 2024, and was an invited residence fellow at the Maaretta Jaukkuri Foundation (Lofoten/Norway).