Prof. Jamie Skye Bianco, Clinical Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, reflects on her interdisciplinary work across digital media theory, ecological fieldwork, and farming practice. In conversation with Lina Ma, she traces a path from documenting toxic environments and early computational media projects to hands-on agricultural work, food systems advocacy, and climate policy engagement. She discusses how lived experience on the land has reshaped her thinking about sustainability, mediation, and environmental justice, and highlights the importance of fieldwork, collaboration, and affective storytelling in addressing the climate crisis.
Lina: Your work moves fluidly between digital media theory, ecological fieldwork, and farming. How did this interdisciplinary path take shape, and what connections do you see between these different parts of your practice?
Prof. Bianco: My work began with long-term studies of toxic environments. I spent years engaged in media capture of incredibly non-remediable spaces of pollution. This work eventually made me sick. And so I began to shift into sustainable practices and an orientation toward futurity. Food, justice, land and water usage. I started myself to practice small farming in order to create a digital app (PlantAPlot) for users to learn and practice actual farming through an app - it was a complete failure! But it did move me into the practice and education about food production. At this moment there was a dynamic group of young activist farmers in Northwestern Delaware County (now the Catskills Agrarian Alliance) who came together to start to rethink food production distribution and systems altogether. I spent a lot of time documenting this process and eventually started to turn my energies more fully toward farming and towards policy and organization.
Lina: Much of your work combines computational and digital media with environmental and ecological concerns. How can media practices help us better understand or engage with environmental challenges today?
Prof. Bianco: This is a difficult question today with the onslaught of generative AI, which is so dangerous ecologically and in terms of our sociality. In some ways I feel like the best thing people can do is to get themselves out in places where the place itself is larger than the desire to mediate it. I've been fortunate to spend an enormous amount of time in places that challenge our sense of mediation over lived experience. But I do think this is one of the things that separates our understanding of water and land practices as well as food production and especially food consumption in urban environments. Because in urban environments it's almost exclusively consumption. And in rural environments, the entire cycle is present. As is the water and power infrastructures.
Lina: You mentioned balancing fieldwork during lambing and kidding season with your academic and policy work. How does working directly with land, animals, and agricultural systems shape your thinking about sustainability?
Prof. Bianco: When I first started farming it was in service to the media and so I was a vegetable farmer and a vegan. I came to the land with ideologies developed from urban consumption. As I spent years learning from other people about food production, sovereignty and access, and learning from the land with the complicated practices involved, I slowly migrated toward small ruminants and egg farming, and became a local ethical omnivore. I've had the privilege of being able to think through what kinds of food production are sustainable beyond high-end urban market-driven local farming and of course beyond factory farming. Diversified regional farming is the most important thing one can do for the land and its people (remember food access during COVID?). And it is also the most labor intensive. Sheep and goats are the most widely farmed protein on a global scale and also offer the most manageable inputs, adaptability and regenerative benefit. Along with chickens and eggs, they are also the most accessible forms of protein for most of the global population outside of wealthy food ecospheres.
Lina: You are also involved in sustainability policy and legislative processes. How do you see the relationship between academic research, creative practice, and policymaking in advancing environmental change?
Prof. Bianco: Because I'm a practice-based contract faculty member, I've always had the luxury of bringing my work back to the world after starting in the field. But it wasn't until recently that I really began to connect with policy, governance and social management. During Covid, I moved my farm to Vermont to a very large and old farm with material and social infrastructure. Vermont has a very open practice of governance and I became involved with a number of lobbying organizations such as the Northeast Organic Farming Association and we have been most recently battling to keep 3SquaresVT - VT SNAP - in the budget. We are on the finish line here! I also worked to advocate for what is now Vermont Act 73, the Farm and Forestry Operations Security Special Fund. After a number of floods and a drought, agriculture in Vermont has been the direct recipient of the effects of the climate crisis for 3 years running. My farm was impacted by the first flood in 2023. Act 73 provides resiliency funds for small farmers when the inevitable next round of climate crisis induced catastrophic weather disrupts farm operations. So while I had been involved with advocacy for farming and regional based food production, it wasn't until the recent political and climate disasters on farms that I realized how important policy work is to the resiliency of local food production under the climate crisis.
Lina: Your current work engages with climate adaptation technologies and food production systems. What developments or innovations in these areas do you find most promising—or most concerning?
Prof. Bianco: From a practical standpoint, I think the thing that concerns me most is the continued intensive use of polymers and plastics in vegetable farming, including all organic and biodynamic forms. From a social education standpoint, I continue to be concerned about a local food ecosystem distorted by urban market-driven and fad-based consumption. In addition the loss of farmland is occurring at an astronomical rate and access to farmland - particularly for young queer and POC farmers - is becoming an emergency. Much of the farmland of the north country of New York State has been turned over to so-called clean energy production, industrial windmills. The area is completely evacuated of human life. Enormous swaths of farmland are being turned over for data centers. These concern me enormously. But perhaps the scariest issue on the horizon is the real collapse of the corporate food system at the same moment that funding for small and local farming has vanished under the current administration’s USDA.
Lina: Your projects often take multimodal forms, including video, sound, and computational media. What role does artistic and experimental work play in communicating environmental issues that traditional academic formats may not capture?
Prof. Bianco: I think the affective dimension of my work was the thing that was most important to me. A sense of the feeling of the research, of the impact. We've known enough cognitively about what the problems are but for quite some time there was difficulty connecting on a level with these issues without it turning folks away from matters of concern. So much of my media work was centered on bringing people into these conversations in felt ways, in affective ways.
My current media project is a collaboration in which we are traveling to farms across the northeast that are run by queer and trans farmers. During the fieldwork we produce anthropotypes and the development process uses the actual matters that they farm, for instance kale or tulips, as part of the development and emulsion process. This produces beautiful, highly naturalized images of queer and trans farmers developed in the very material that they grow. We are planning an event in the fall to bring this project to NYU, both as a gallery show and as a practical hands-on workshop, to experience the process.
Lina: As students increasingly look to work at the intersection of media, sustainability, and social impact, what advice would you give to those trying to build interdisciplinary careers?
Prof. Bianco: Focus on the fieldwork. Focus on the collaborations with other people engaged in the same conversations and in the same struggles. Organize locally. Don't let the structures of academia dictate the work but rather let the problems that the work summons dictate the structures in which the work is brought to academia. Pace yourself for the long journey.
