The urban realities we face today are fantastically complex.  They require new ways of seeing, knowing, and acting.  As creative practitioners, we explore these realities by directly engaging with them.  We view urban landscapes from many scales and perspectives, understanding the conditions of the contemporary metropolis as a dynamic ecosystem.  In our "post-wild" world, reconciling “nature” and “city” into a more seamless space of understanding becomes an increasingly urgent challenge.  We believe cities can become more vibrant, resilient, and responsive from the bottom up, and we embrace this challenge with a dual spirit of the serious and the playful.  Drawing upon design, art, and science as a framework for action, we view our role as collective enablers, seeking overlaps between the human and the non-human, the domesticated and the feral, the visible and the invisible.  For us, this means embracing rather than erasing the existing legacies and conditions that define the city, however messy they might be.

Coming together through a shared sense of creative urgency, Kim and Daniel founded Commonstudio in 2008 and have embraced the friction of collaboration ever since. They are currently developing interventions, installations, and research initiatives spanning the American Rust Belt, Sun Belt, and the megacities of south Asia.

Their work has been recognized by Core77, Fast Company, The Buckminster Fuller Institute, and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the 2013 Venice Design Biennale. The duo jointly received the 2014-15 Prince Charitable Trust Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture, were 2017 residents at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and 2024 residents at Interlude. Experiments in cooperative living and creative practice in west Texas, were funded in part by a 2021-22 interchange artist grant and 2024 Texas A&M Forest Service Urban & Community Forestry grant.

Daniel Phillips is a landscape architect and urban ecologist.  He studied Environmental Design at Otis College of Art and Design, and earned a PhD from the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). From 2020-24 he served as an assistant professor of landscape architecture at Texas Tech University, where he established the Green Infrastructure Landscape Lab (GILL). He is currently an assistant professor of landscape architecture at University of Oregon’s School of Architecture & Environment. Daniel is also a regular contributor to The Nature of Cities, and a former Fulbright-Nehru scholar. His research has been published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals across design, hydrology, engineering, and urban planning disciplines. He always laughs at his own jokes.

Kim Karlsrud explores the grey areas between art and design, and the intersection of objects and landscapes. Before co-founding Commonstudio, Kim established the Los Angeles chapter of Project H Design, a global social design non-profit. She holds an undergraduate degree in Product Design from Otis College of Art and Design, and an MFA in studio Art from the University of Michigan.  She held the 2020-21 visiting artist and and instructor position at Graceland University, served as the Director of Design for Sostento, a non-profit consultancy from 2021-24, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon’s College of Design. She never laughs at Daniel’s jokes.