Alice Lewis

Dr Alice Lewis is a lecturer in landscape architecture at RMIT University with an interest in the reciprocity of thought, action and the physical landscape.

Dr Lewis' research investigates how the power of prosthetic technologies - from policies and maps to clothing - can be re-directed or re-made to reveal often-hidden capitalist legacies of landscape destruction, and to develop and instigate more regenerative modes of inhabitation.

Her approach to pedagogy builds directly on this research, which is often collaborative and interdisciplinary, and aims to cultivate practices of care between and for human and non-human environments. She explores in landscape architectural education as a place where the innovative and experimental practices needed to face our challenging future can be explored and developed. Pedagogies are focused on nurturing and developing cohesive and future-focused structures for learning that support both students and staff to make real world impact and contribute to timely conversations, such as those around climate and reconciliation.

Key projects:

Reimagining Birrarung — NGV Australia, 2024/25
Exhibiting Designer, with BUSH Projects

Alice Lewis was invited to contribute to Reimagining Birrarung, the major summer exhibition at NGV Australia (2024/25), as part of the BUSH Projects team. The exhibition brought together nine landscape architecture practices to imagine the future of Melbourne’s main river, the Birrarung, 50 years from now.

The provocation developed by the team proposed the establishment of the Birrarung Bio-Zone in 2070—an ecologically protected habitat created following the public acquisition of private agricultural land along the upper Birrarung floodplain. Drawing on LiDAR scans and computer-generated sequences to reveal millennia of river movement, the work explored how the Bio-Zone could be maintained and accessed through speculative maps, equipment, and landscape plans.

The exhibition critically engaged with contemporary policies and challenges shaping the river catchment and was supported by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects. It received coverage in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and other national media.

Material Mapping: Fashion Fictions — Vancouver Art Gallery, 2023
Participatory Drawing Project, with Material Matters (Emily Carr University of Art and Design)

Alice Lewis was invited by the Material Matters research hub to contribute to Lab Here//To//For, a participatory component of the Fashion Fictions exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2023). Her project engaged material designers and the public in a collective mapping process, using base-map templates and prompt-based questions to trace the hidden impacts of material extraction.

Through guided map-making, participants explored the ecological entanglements, colonial histories, and production processes underpinning material use in the fashion industry. The work aimed to cultivate material consciousness by revealing how extractive legacies continue to shape environments.

The project has since been presented at the ECLAS Conference (2024), featured in the Landscape Economy Handbook for Education, and published in Radical Fashion Exercises (Valiz, 2023).

Possibilities in Motion — One By Walking Symposium, Finland, 2023
Mapping Installation and Walking Workshop

Developed in response to an invitation from the steering committee of the One By Walking international research network, this project was presented at their 2023 symposium in Korpo, Finland. The work investigates how mapping practices can reveal entangled human and geologic temporalities, and how cartographic tools might be reimagined to challenge human exceptionalism.

Focusing on Glacial Isostatic Adjustment in the Finnish Archipelago, the project combined diagrams, cartographic projections, and a participatory walking activity that traced the geologic shifts occurring during attendees’ lifetimes. In doing so, it drew attention to the overlapping scales and durations of human and earth processes.

This work is published as ‘Possibilities in Motion: Prosthetic Maps and Micro-Walks for Tectonic Encounters’ in One By Walking: Transdisciplinary Mobilities and Methodologies (Lexington Books, 2025).

Awards:

2024 RMIT DSC Teaching Excellence Award

2016 Australian Postgraduate Award
2014 Australian Cycling Promotion Fund – Reignition for Innovation