Laura Kurgan teaches architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning at Columbia University, where she is Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) and the Director of Visual Studies. Her work explores problems ranging from digital location technologies, the ethics and politics of mapping, to new structures of participation in design, and the visualization of urban and global data. Her recent research includes a multi-year SIDL project on "million-dollar blocks" and the urban costs of the American incarceration experiment and an exhibition on global migration and climate change, Native Land: Stop Eject, at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Her work has appeared at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Whitney Altria, MACBa Barcelona, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the Museum of Modern Art (where it is part of the permanent collection). She was named one of Esquire Magazine's 'Best and Brightest' in 2008, and was awarded a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship in 2009. She has published articles and essays in Atlantic Magazine, Volume, Grey Room, Assemblage, and Else/Where Mapping, among other books and journals.