Mariel Collard Arias

I am a designer and landscape educator and have been part of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at Pratt Institute since its inaugural year in 2022.

My work learns from ancestral landscape traditions to challenge the spatial legacies of coloniality. I engage their practices, materials, and tools through embodied and applied research, attending to how they refine ecological awareness, build landscape competence, and cultivate intimate relationships with the living world. Two current projects ground this work. Survival Ecologies is a fieldwork-based study of outdoor survival practices that traces how Indigenous, military, and bushcraft lineages shape knowledge of land. Reedworks investigates the principles of basketry at the scale of landscape infrastructure, drawing on historical erosion-control techniques and living shoreline approaches to work with plants that already thrive in disturbed wetlands. These projects emphasize learning through making and material experimentation in the field, principles that also shape my teaching.

I hold a Master in Landscape Architecture and a Master in Design Studies with a concentration in Risk & Resilience from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I earned my Professional Degree in Architecture from Universidad Iberoamericana and am a registered architect in Mexico. Professionally, I have collaborated with firms in Mexico, the United States, and Canada on public and private projects across landscape architecture, urban design, and architecture. Before joining Pratt, I taught as a lecturer in the BArch and MArch programs at McGill University and co-led an independent practice based in Mexico City.