Maggie Camillos

Maggie researches how to understand and visualize vitality in landscapes, developing a theory of vitality and bodily organization that allows her to weave multiple ways of knowing landscapes into visual stories of life force and relationality. Her work engages geomorphology and earth systems sciences, critical cartographic theory, land-based knowledge, artistic synthesis, and various medicinal practices, alongside creative approaches to storytelling, cartographic representation, and research methodology. She is currently doing a comparative study between landscapes in Oahu, Hawai’i and the Southern Sierra Nevada.

Raised with a deep love for both art and the outdoors, Maggie is committed to integrating these passions into her academic and creative practice. She started painting portraits and figures from an early age, and has honed her portraiture practice throughout her development as an artist. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, she majored in Geography with a focus on Earth system science, and completed a senior thesis on climate change mobilization, producing an illustrated essay on holistic environmental activism. She also conducted fieldwork on environmental health and local Indigenous knowledge of coastal subsistence fisheries in the Solomon Islands, during which she became interested in weaving together different environmental knowledge systems, and working directly with local community members in learning the stories of landscapes. Personal health journeys have inspired her to explore physiology and integrative medicine, enriching her understanding of the body, and of Earth systems as living systems. She is now working to integrate all of these threads by developing portraits of earth bodies in landscapes she loves dearly, informed by her various scientific, artistic, and land-based epistemological practices. Outside of research, she enjoys singing and making music with her band, acting, backpacking, and traveling.