SOM Foundation Features the Work of Virginia Hanusik

Virginia Hanusik’s photography explores the relationships between landscape, culture, and the built environment. The selected images, which were drawn from a body of work the artist developed over the past decade, serve as a visual reference to the SOM Foundation’s 2024–25 topic, Advancing Toward a Water-Secure Future.

Virginia Hanusik is an artist and writer whose work has been exhibited internationally and featured in The New Yorker, National Geographic, British Journal of Photography, Places Journal, The Atlantic, MAS Context, and Oxford American, among others. Her work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Pulitzer Center, Graham Foundation, Landmark Columbus Foundation, and Mellon Foundation. Hanusik regularly writes and speaks on landscape representation and the visual narrative of climate change, and she is on the board of directors of The Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans where she coordinates multi-disciplinary projects on the climate crisis.

Hanusik’s first book, Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana, published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City in summer 2024, glimpses the vulnerabilities and possibilities of living on the water during an ongoing climate catastrophe and the fallout of the fossil fuel industry—past, present, and future.

Further Reading

• Michael Adno, “In Louisiana, a Photographer Charts Storms and Weather as Markers of Time,” Aperture, September 2024.
• Virginia Hanusik, “All the Good Earth,” The Bitter Southerner, November 2022.
• Virginia Hanusik, Iker Gil, and Mimi Zeiger, “On the Origins of High Water,” MAS Context, April 2022.