Leah Meisterlin is a cartographer and geospatial methodologist. Trained as an architect and urban planner, Leah’s work engages the relationship between mapping technologies, representation, and spatial justice, in cities and across regions.
Today, Leah leads Meisterlin Projects—a design, research, and consulting practice—and teaches at Barnard College in Architecture and Urban Studies.
Her articles and essays have appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Planning Perspectives, the Avery Review, and ARPA Journal. Among others, her work has been shown in exhibition at the Oslo Architecture Triennial and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is also one of the co-PIs on the public spatial history projects Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas and Envisioning Seneca Village.
She has taught at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where she received the university’s Presidential Teaching Award in 2019, as well as the Cooper Union, the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture and Design, and New York University. She was an Adjunct Associate Research Scholar at Columbia's Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and a Research Scientist at New York University's Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health. Professionally, she has contributed to several experimental and exploratory practices in 21st-century urbanism. Among those, she cofounded Office: MG; served as Director of Research at Special Project Office; and cofounded PRE-Office, a design and research studio that investigated the organizational structures behind design processes in the wake of the US foreclosure crisis.
