Harvard Club of Washington, DC

John Beardsley teaches courses in landscape architectural history, theory, and writing, including Theories and Practices of Contemporary Landscape Architecture, Contemporary Landscape Design in Asia, Landscape Strategies for Low-Income Settlements, and EarthwordsWriting About Landscape.  

Beardsley lives in Washington, DC, where he is director of garden and landscape studies at Dumbarton Oaks. In addition to being a teacher, he is an author and curator. He has written extensively on public and environmental art, including the books Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape (fourth edition 2006) and Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists(1995). He has organized exhibitions for numerous museums, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, and for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 1997, he was curator of the visual arts project, "Human Nature: Art and Landscape in Charleston," at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston. He has recently been working on a series of exhibitions and publications on southern African American folk and vernacular art, including "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" (2002) for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the recent work of the self-taught painter and sculptor Thornton Dial for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005). In 2008, he coorganized the GSD exhibition "Dirty Work: Transforming the Landscape of Nonformal Cities in the Americas."