Lina Bondarenko
Lina Bondarenko (born in Kyiv, Ukraine and raised in San Francisco, CA) is a graduate student of Architecture Studies and Urbanism at MIT. She researches how slope geomorphology shapes urban history and the estrangement of post-industrial value systems. She works across the mediums of site-specific art and participatory performance to develop a pedagogy for human-environment collaboration, embodying entanglements of the deep past, enacting a grounded present, and animating alternative futures.
She was invited to present her research project, “The Basket Contains No Bread, Metabolizing Ecocide in Ukraine’s Soils and Grains,” at the Tbilisi Architecture Biennale, EASST Making and Doing Transformations Conference in Amsterdam, and Wellesley College. Her art installation, “Growing Sunflowers on Moontime, Rooting Talismans in Black Earth,” was presented in the Vessel Group Show in San Francisco and Los Angeles Design Week. Her project, “Steep Urbanists,” was featured as a special program at the AIA National Conference and Architecture in the City Festival in San Francisco, exhibited at 80Albion Gallery, and published in Silt Magazine. A video she produced, filmed, and edited for Professor Caroline Jones is currently on view at the Venice Biennale.
Prior to starting studies at MIT, Lina taught architecture and design at a public arts highschool for three years, developing a curriculum for sophomores. She also worked as an architectural designer at Red Dot Studio and urban planner with Ideo and Gehl Architects in San Francisco. She was a project leader with Bjarke Ingels Group in Copenhagen and New York, designing commercial, cultural, institutional, and residential projects. She was a resident in Postgraduate Programme on speculative futures, “The New Normal,” at Strelka Institute, where she co-founded the augmented urban reality platform, Patternist. Patternist was presented at Ideas City Festival with the New Museum in New York and Impakt Festival in Utrecht, and featured in Archis Volume journal.
