Patrick M. Lydon

Lydon is founder of City as Nature, and serves as the arts editor for The Nature of Cities (New York). He has written about urban ecology and art for Kyoto Journal, YES! Magazine, Routledge Press, and others. In 2019, he co-curated the Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Knowledge at Sorbonne University in Paris, and previously served a city-council-appointed role as Arts Commissioner for the City of San Jose (USA). His internationally exhibited artwork inspires empathic relationships between humans and nature, drawing on years of nomadic study with the farmer-philosophers of East Asia. He holds an MFA with distinction from the University of Edinburgh’s “Art, Space & Nature” program, with previous studies at Aichi University of Art, and California State University, San Jose. Together with his wife Suhee Kang, he co-directed the internationally-acclaimed film Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness, which has been translated into seven languages and continues to be screened around the world. He currently lives in Osaka, Japan, and tends to a natural urban garden with Suhee.