Jess Vanecek

Research Assistant Professor - Yamuna River Project

Jess Vanecek is a designer, researcher, and educator whose work investigates the spatial implications of anthropogenic practices that radically alter, structure, and control the natural environment. Her research focuses on riverine and coastal territories shaped by infrastructural and regulatory intervention, and the challenges such places face in the context of climate change. Jess works fluidly across disciplines, scales, and temporal frameworks, using speculative graphic representation methods to make tangible the complex spatial intersections of climate, data, policy, infrastructure, community, and environment.

Jess teaches studios and seminars on architecture, architectural representation, and design research. She has held positions at the University of Virginia School of Architecture – where she was an inaugural Virginia Architecture Fellow – and at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to teaching, Jess has extensive experience in practice and has contributed to numerous award-winning competitions across the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design.

She was a primary contributor on the research and publication of Way Beyond Bigness: The Need for a Watershed Architecture (AR+D Publishing, 2023) by Derek Hoeferlin, a design-research project that analyzes the Mekong, Mississippi, and Rhine river basins, with particular focus on multi-scaled, water-based infrastructural transformation. She joins Tulane to work on the Yamuna River Project, a collaborative research project investigating the urbanization and ecological revitalization of the Yamuna River in New Dehli.

Jess holds a dual Master of Architecture and Master of Construction Management (both with Honors) from Washington University in St. Louis, as well as a Bachelor of Science in Architecture with Minors in Architectural History and Historic Preservation from the University of Virginia.