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.

As of Fall 2026, Rowell is Associate Professor of Creative Entrepreneurship and Director of the Planetary Futures Lab at MCAD, which emerged from a $17M U.S. Army Corps of Engineers research program led at MCAD in partnership with the Corps' Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), multiple universities across the U.S., and the Arctic Data Center at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), UCSB. Rowell led digital twin development for the program, working alongside MCAD students, faculty, and community partners to document climate-driven permafrost thaw through time-series LiDAR, drone photogrammetry, terrestrial scanning, immersive video, binaural audio, VR, and GIS integration.

The Planetary Futures Lab carries this work forward as a geospatial media research studio investigating critical landscapes, climate visualization, and the spatial relations of planetary infrastructure, with active research into Arctic infrastructure and permafrost thaw, AI infrastructure and landscape, and fragile biomes and hydrological systems. The Lab is also engineered to generate revenue for MCAD and its Creative Entrepreneurship department, and to give students something more than coursework: real experience launching businesses, studios, and nonprofit ventures. In an economy defined by disruption, that experience is a genuine advantage—entrepreneurial fluency fused with ecological awareness and sustainability, preparing graduates to build resilient careers and to carry that same rigor forward as a framework for artistic practice. A related initiative, Planetary Spatial LLC, is Rowell's startup applying this same research to high-fidelity digital twins of critical landscapes.

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.