BREANNA BROWNING-WILSON
Breanna Browning-Wilson is a designer, strategist, educator, and creative technical leader based in Los Angeles, California.
She holds a Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a postgraduate Master of Science from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).
Her interdisciplinary practice explores how we construct and inhabit meaning in the age of synthetic systems - using emerging technologies and spatial media to create new conditions that challenge how we tell stories and navigate complexity. Her approach integrates digital and physical materials through hybrid workflows, speculative design, and systems thinking. She is interested in the misuse of technological tools to reveal new modes of authorship, perception, and representation.
Professionally, she is an expert in leading complex projects and interdisciplinary teams working with state-of-the-art technologies. Her expertise spans strategy, foresight, and the translation of emerging tools (including 3D/AI/ML) into applications across art, games, tech, education, and culture.
CURRENTLY:
Faculty at
SCI-Arc Synthetic Landscapes
Lecturer at
UCLA Design Media Arts
Creative Technical Director Emergentic.ai /
The Garden in the Machine
© Breanna Browning-Wilson 2026
SECOND NATURE
(VISUAL STUDIES 2891)
School: SCI-Arc
Program: Postgraduate MS Synthetic Landscapes
Fall 2025Final student film (class-wide)
This seminar explores strategies for representing landscapes in relation to the increasingly ambiguous definition of “nature.” As it is now impossible to separate the artificial from the natural, traditional methods of depicting ecological conditions fail to capture the nuance and inherent messiness of contemporary landscapes. This course asks students to rethink conventional representational approaches through the use—and deliberate subversion—of generative design tools, game engines, AI-based imaging techniques, and storytelling methods. By coaxing typically rigid and tidy technological tools towards entanglement and complexity, students create virtual environments that embrace and represent the messy coexistence of the human and nonhuman.
Link to Course Website
Download Syllabus
DIGITAL 3D DESIGN
(DES 213)
School: USC
Program: Roski Design
Fall 2025Sammi LiSammi LiMiyu IkedaSiena SepsSophie FranchettiWilliam Eggleston
Advanced use of digital methods and computational tools with an emphasis on 3D objects for physical and virtual spaces.
This course positions 3D creation as a form of critical inquiry, examining how digital and physical tools can shape meaning, aesthetics, process, and models of creative practice. Over the semester, students develop a thematic investigation through multiple workflows - ranging from manual construction and material experiments to computational modeling and digital fabrication.
Link to Course Website
Download Syllabus
ADVANCED DIGITAL DESIGN
(DES 303)
School: USC
Program: Roski Design
Fall 2025Abbreviated Final Student Projects
This course approaches digital design as a time-based and interactive practice, exploring how narrative, motion, sound, and computational processes can organize experience, direct attention, and shape cultural meaning. Students will investigate a single theme across multiple formats, moving from language and image into motion, sound, interface, and code-based interactive systems. Through these transformations, students will study how meaning shifts and is reshaped as it moves between media, platforms, and modes of participation.
Link to Course Website
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EXPERIMENTS IN VIRTUALITY
(DESMA 130)
School: UCLA
Program: Design Media Arts
Fall 2025
-> Student Work Gallery Coming Soon
This course approaches virtuality as a practice of experimental storytelling through digital assemblage. It explores how narrative can emerge through the collection, composition, and reimagining of fragments of synthetic media - material generated or mediated by digital processes. This includes sources like internet culture, AI-generated content, 3D assets, simulations, images, sound, video, and other forms of found media.
The output of the course is the creation of new kinds of stories - stories that could only emerge through the assemblage of synthetic media and engagement with contemporary technologies. Student projects may take the form of short films, 3D environments, interactive interfaces, installations, performances, or other hybrid formats that combine fragments into experimental narratives. Each project will be an experiment in authorship, worldbuilding, and the possibilities of virtuality.
Link to Course Website
Download Syllabus
FAR FROM EQUILIBRIUM
(HISTORY/THEORY 2813)
School: SCI-Arc
Program: Postgraduate MS Synthetic Landscapes
Summer 2025Kahin VasiKahin VasiAhmed YakoutMartí Vera Marsal
Rudy ArgoteThis seminar explores strategies for communication and presentation by studying and simulating far from equilibrium states. In science, “far from equilibrium” refers to moments when a system is driven beyond thermodynamic stability by unrelenting surplus—when inputs outpace dissipation. Many of nature’s most spectacular phenomena—storms, volcanic eruptions, bioluminescent blooms—only exist in imbalance. We will treat these combustible moments as opportunities: excess and conflict will become raw material for experimentation and creativity. Via a series of computation and design exercises, students will build generative agent simulations of far from equilibrium dynamics, distill compelling emergent conditions, and translate those insights into speculative spatial, representational, and experiential prototypes and exhibitions.
View Final Student Work: https://farfromequilibrium.org/
Link to Course Website
Download Syllabus
3D MODELING & MOTION
(DESMA 131)
School: UCLA
Program: Design Media Arts
Spring 2025
Link to Course Website
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Introduction to theories of three-dimensional form, spatial design, and lighting, using three-dimensional visualization and video tools. Tools originally designed for motion to be used to construct form. Use of aspects of time, such as speed and duration, to contemplate form and interaction. Exploration of virtual versus real form.
TA: Elliot Yu
NOT YOUR AVERAGE NATURE DOC
(VISUAL STUDIES 2811)
School: SCI-Arc
Program: Postgraduate MS Synthetic Landscapes
Fall
2024
Final student film (class-wide)
Link to Course Website
Download Syllabus
This seminar explores strategies for representing landscapes in relation to the increasingly ambiguous definition of “nature.” As it is now impossible to separate the artificial from the natural, traditional methods of depicting ecological conditions fail to capture the nuance and inherent messiness of contemporary landscapes. This course asks students to rethink conventional representational approaches through the use—and deliberate subversion—of generative design tools, game engines, AI-based imaging techniques, and storytelling methods. By coaxing typically rigid and tidy technological tools towards entanglement and complexity, students create virtual environments that embrace and represent the messy coexistence of the human and nonhuman.
3D MODELING & MOTION
(DESMA 131)
School: UCLA
Program: Design Media Arts
Fall 2024
Link to Course Website
Download Syllabus
Introduction to theories of three-dimensional form, spatial design, and lighting, using three-dimensional visualization and video tools. Tools originally designed for motion to be used to construct form. Use of aspects of time, such as speed and duration, to contemplate form and interaction. Exploration of virtual versus real form.
TA: Vinny Roca
3D MODELING & MOTION
(DESMA 156)
School: UCLA
Program: Design Media Arts
Winter 2024
Link to Course Website / Student Project Gallery
Download Syllabus
Introduction to theories of three-dimensional form, spatial design, and lighting, using three-dimensional visualization and video tools. Tools originally designed for motion to be used to construct form. Use of aspects of time, such as speed and duration, to contemplate form and interaction. Exploration of virtual versus real form.
TA: Henry Yang