Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Columbia GSAPP) is thrilled to announce that Catherine Griffiths has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and will teach in the School’s Computational Design Practices program. Catherine Griffiths is a designer and researcher whose innovative work at the intersection of critical AI studies, social documentary, and algorithmic visualization produces new vocabularies to make visible the relationships among the ethics of machine learning, labor relations, algorithmic governance, and the future of work. Her simulations, short films, video installations, and critical software pieces particularly explore the potential and the political implications of machine learning in societies and ecosystems, and investigate the computational forces that shape power and structure relational systems across different scales from cities to workplaces and within the home.

Catherine Griffiths will play a key role at Columbia GSAPP, a School that for the last decades has led how to mobilize and critically address computation’s impact on design, spatial practices, and research. Launched in 2021, the Computational Design Practices program, CDP, is directed by Professor Laura Kurgan and pioneers new concepts and pedagogies for a multi-scalar and spatial approach to computational design as both method and practice. Open to pre- and post-professional students from diverse backgrounds, the CDP program trains future design practitioners and cultivates new paradigms for scholarly research, experimental practice, creative technology, communication, and action. The program provides a pedagogical platform for all programs across GSAPP to maximize their disciplines’ capacities to operate through critical computational practices.

As a research practitioner whose work investigates the relationship between the ethics of machine learning, labor relations, gender politics, and the future of work, Catherine Griffiths’ appointment to the CDP faculty further cements the program’s critical and creative engagement, and unique capacity to prepare students for a range of design, research, creative, civic, activist, or entrepreneurial roles. Griffiths’ work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at Geidei University in Tokyo, and the National Etruscan Museum in Rome. Recent publications include book chapters in Design and Science and Engaging the Margins: Experimental Practices in Interdisciplinary Art, as well as articles in Prospectives Journal and Gradient Journal_. Among other recognitions, she is the recipient of a 2024 BRAID Responsible AI research grant from UK Research and Innovation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, in collaboration with the University of Bournemouth, UK. Catherine Griffiths received her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Media Arts + Practice from the University of Southern California, and holds an M.Arch from The Bartlett, University College London, and a B.A. from Camberwell College, University of the Arts London. Prior to joining Columbia GSAPP, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan.