Steve Rowell

Steve Rowell is an artist who works with photography, moving image, sound, installation, maps, and spatial concepts. His practice investigates terrains of perception, nonhuman intelligence, ecologies, and technology, exploring the landscape as a site of political imagination. Steve contextualizes the morphology of the built environment with the surrounding medium of Nature, appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist.

At MCAD, Rowell is a Post-Graduate Research Fellow on a federally funded climate visualization project in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL). Working within a multi-year, multi-institution research network, he helps document and visualize climate-driven permafrost thaw in Arctic Alaska through field data capture, spatial analysis, and immersive media. The work is both ecological and civic in its implications—illuminating rapid Arctic change as it intersects with sustainability, geopolitics, and Indigenous quality of life.

This research directly informs two new initiatives: Planetary Spatial LLC, his startup focused on high-fidelity digital twins of critical landscapes, and the growing Planetary Futures Lab at MCAD—a student-facing platform translating research-grade methods into creative technologies, curriculum, and public-facing storytelling. The Lab positions MCAD to become a more visible leader in creative tech and spatial media, expanding the college’s capacity for ambitious, real-world research partnerships while giving students hands-on access to advanced tools and workflows shaping the future of art, design, and climate communication.

Awards and honors include major fellowships and national awards such as the FilmNorth + McKnight Foundation McKnight Media Artist Fellowship (Media Arts, 2024), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (Film/Video, 2019), and a Creative Capital Award (Emerging Fields, 2013), as well as support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Film/Video, 2013). Institutional awards and research support include the Reginald Moore Travel Grant for Research in Activism and Social Justice from Rice University’s Woodson Research Center (Co–Grantee with Priyanka Basu, 2025), the Erna Plachte Scholarship at the University of Oxford (2016), and a HaSS Visiting Faculty Fellowship with Newcastle University’s Global Urban Research Unit (2010). He has also received Minnesota State Arts Board grants (2022, 2025).

He holds an MFA with Distinction from the University of Oxford and a BA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin.