Erin Ashenhurst

Erin is a writer, designer, and co-founder of the Big Pictures Lab. She has led seminar, studio, and writing-intensive courses in design and cultural studies at the Wilson School of Design since 2010. With a background in publishing and interactive design, she holds a BFA in Visual Art (Simon Fraser University), a certificate in Publishing from Columbia University’s School of Journalism, and an MA in Interactive Arts and Technology (SFU).

Exploring frameworks of narrative, Erin’s research focuses on urban landscapes; film, screen cultures, and representations of place; nostalgia and collective memory; and humour and the oddity of everyday experience. Beginning in 2023, Erin and faculty member Carley Hodgkinson proposed, planned, and produced Big Pictures, a conference on murals, billboards, and urban interventions. Bringing together academics, designers, artists, and curators, Big Pictures Lab investigates the powerful role of visual culture in urban environments.

Erin’s work has been presented globally at conferences such as ACM SIGGRAPH Asia (Seoul), ISEA (Istanbul), Monstrous Geographies (Oxford, Prague), Media Architecture Biennale (Toronto), and AMPS Livable Cities (London). Her chapter on the depiction of the city in the television show The Real Housewives of Vancouver was published in The Fantasy of Reality: Critical Essays (Silverman, 2015), and her chapter on Hollywood North as a landscape haunted by fictions appears in Screen Tourism and Affective Landscapes (Champion, Lee, 2022). In her teaching, she facilitates contextual analyses of everyday culture and encourages students to think critically about both silly and serious phenomena.