Kick-Off Day 02 and Keynote by Lucas Mertehikian

Opening and welcome for the second conference day, followed by a keynote by Lucas Mertehikian.

Keynote: Life with Plants: Design Lessons from the Plant Humanities

By Lucas Mertehikian 
PhD, Director of the Humanities Institute at the New York Botanical Garden.

Lucas Mertehikian teaches courses on Plant Humanities at the Master in Landscape Architecture, at Pratt Institute, and is a Researcher at the New York Botanical Garden, where he also served as Director of the Humanities Institute. Before joining NYBG, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington DC, where he is still involved with the development of the Plant Humanities Lab. He is the co-editor of Imagining a New Natural History (Florida University Press, 2026) and Unpredictable Gardens (Brill, 2027), and his writing has appeared in journals in Latin America and the United States. He collaborated with Brazilian-Italian artist Debora Hirsch on the video-installation Vanishing Trees, which opened at Palazzo Citterio in January 2026.