Miranda Mote, PhD, FAAR, ASLA
Miranda is an architect, historian, artist, and educator based in Philadelphia. As an artist she narrates stories about plants with monotype printmaking methods that use plant specimens, botanical pigments, dyes, and fibers. Her methods are derived from a historical study of methods used by early modern botanists and naturalists. She has taught at University of Cincinnati, Maryland Institute College of Art, Pratt Institute, Temple University, and now University of Pennsylvania, currently teaching as a part of Penn’s Landscape Studies minor and undergraduate program in Architecture.
Miranda was the 2023-24 Garden Club of America / Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize, Landscape Architecture Fellow. While residing in Rome she exhibited her botanical printmaking at the Academy and at the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome, taught at three Italian elementary schools, developed DIGS, a K-12 environmental literacy curriculum that uses art to teach language and STEM subjects, and designed a teaching game system, HIVE. In 2022, she established Botanography as a 501c3, non-profit to directly serve students and families in Philadelphia County and believes that environmental justice begins with environmental literacy and children.
For more information about Miranda's artwork and K12 pedagogy see: www.botanography.net
BArch University of Cincinnati (1995)
MDes History and Philosophy of Design, Harvard University (2015)
PhD History and Theory of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania (2021)
K12 Environmental Literacy
Gardens in K12 Education
Early Modern Garden History in Europe and North America
History of Nature Printing
Botanical Printmaking
ARCH 2020 Design Fundamentals II
ARCH 3801 Languages of Landscape and Place
ARCH 4998 Senior Thesis Colloquium
Manuscript:
DIGS: Pedagogy for a Just City and an Arts Focused Urban, K-12 Literacy and Science Education
Exhibitions:
Botanical Autopsies, A Labyrinth of Plants and People of the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome (Spring 2024)
Peer Reviewed Publications:
A Botanical Beehive of poetry and belief in Philadelphia gardens, a radical refiguring of garden culture in colonial Pennsylvania before 1719.
Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, An International Quarterly, Taylor and Francis Group, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 136–163, Fall 2023.
Im Gemeinstry Garten: Evidence of a Common Healing Garden in Seventeenth-Century Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Fall 2021.
The Art of Gardening in a Pennsylvania Woods, Francis D. Pastorius’ garden in Germantown, Pennsylvania (ca. 1683–1719)
Invited to write for Expedition Magazine, official members’ magazine for the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Fall 2020 special issue.
Botanography (501c3)
Affiliate Member, American Society of Landscape Architecture (ASLA)
ASLA’s Committee on K-12 Education and Career Discovery