About WasteScapes

WasteScapes is a multi-platform research-creation designed by Liz Miller and MJ Thompson that involves pedagogical resources, media interventions, publications and site-based learning.

Elizabeth (Liz) Miller is a Professor in Communication Studies and a documentary maker with an expertise in environmental media. She uses collaboration and interactivity as a way to connect personal stories to larger social issues such as water privatization, climate migration, gender & climate change.  Her media projects such as The Shore Line, Hands-on: Women, Climate, Change, and SwampScapes, have won awards and been screened in classrooms and at international festivals such as Hot Docs, Atlanta and RIDM. She is the co-author of Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice (2017). The book has a companion website profiling twenty-nine socially engaged practitioners.

MJ Thompson (PhD., New York University 2008) is a writer and teacher working on performance and embodiment. Her articles have appeared in Ballettanz, Border Crossings, The Brooklyn Rail, Canadian Art, Dance Current, The Globe and Mail, and more. Her academic work is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada; and her essays have appeared in several anthologies, including Performance Studies Canada (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2017). Most recently, she received the National Park Service Arts and Sciences Residency, Cape Cod, August 2019, where she worked on an essay about land privatization and the concept of the view as embodied (Departures 2020).