Michael Ezban, RA, ASLA, LEED AP

Michael Ezban is a registered architect, member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, author, and educator. Ezban’s scholarship is focused on the design of landscapes and buildings that foster mutualistic entanglements between human and non-human animals. He advocates that cultivating multispecies kinship through innovative design of the public realm is an urgent and necessary practice in the Anthropocene.

Ezban widely disseminates his ideas through writing, exhibition, and invited lectures. His first book, Aquaculture Landscapes: Fish Farms and the Public Realm (Routledge, 2020), explores the landscape architecture of farms, reefs, parks, and cities that entwine fish and human lives. Aquaculture Landscapes delivers an account of the coalitions of fish and humans that shape the form, function, and identity of cities, and offers a forward-thinking theorization of landscape as the preeminent medium for the design of ichthyological urbanism. The book was awarded the 2020 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, an honor bestowed by the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

In his over five years at MAPP, Ezban has delivered leadership on critical Program functions and led novel initiatives; he has also developed a teaching portfolio that includes innovative graduate and undergraduate design studios focused on multispecies design, courses focused on advanced digital visualization, and most recently, pedagogies that leverage generative Artificial Intelligence (in collaboration with faculty colleagues Lindsey May and Brittany Williams). Ezban’s teaching excellence has been recognized at both the School and the University level, through the 2025 MAPP Outstanding Educator Award and the 2022 UMD PALS Outstanding Teaching Award. 

Research Interests:

• Multispecies architecture
• Landscape architecture
• Cohabitation
• Multispecies entanglement
• Generative AI