Jonathon Ellison ’94 (center) speaks to students after formal project presentations.Jonathon Ellison ’94 has been appointed Distinguished Design Teaching Fellow for the 2013-2014 academic year.
Jonathon runs his own design and planning company in rural Quebec. In addition to his degree from Conway, he holds a master’s in Community Economic Development and a BA in architecture and communications.
Since leaving Conway in 1994, his design and consulting work has taken him from Canada and the eastern US to Portugal, South Asia, the Cayman Islands, England, Senegal, Haiti and Kenya. Jonathon has taught design in Sri Lanka’s Colombo School of Architecture, India’s IES College of Architecture in Mumbai, and he recently finished teaching at Senegal’s Ecole Superieure d’Economie Appliquée – Amenagement du Territoire, Environment et Gestion Urbain, in Dakar. Jonathon’s teaching approach is to get design students involved in local solutions for local issues, where he feels international development often gets it wrong. He has also become involved in messaging health issues to less-fortunate communities where he clowns as a way of touching humanity, helping with emergency relief, and helping to bring out the potential for sustainable change.
Jonathon recently returned from Senegal, where his work included a master plan for part of the town of Tivaouane in the north. He combines his sustainable landscape design practice with community education and international clowning adventures; in recent years, he has presented guest lectures in Sri Lanka, India, and parts of Africa and has become involved in community health messaging through clowning. He has performed in Montreal, New York, Haiti, Kenya, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Senegal, and India. He has designed private estates, urban food gardens, school master plans, a temple site plan with Hindu monks, and a Cree First Nation village master plan with elders in Canada’s far north. He is currently designing a master plan for a series of mosques and a conference center in Tivaouane, Senegal, one of the holiest sites in West Africa. He is also volunteering his time and clowning for a fishing-womens’ village in Bargny, Senegal.
Jonathon’s cover story for the Fall 2007 issue of con’text, “Communities, Design, and What the Buddha Inspired: A Sri Lankan Perspective,” described his year in post-tsunami Sri Lanka. Read it here:
