Ponnapa Prakkamakul

Ponnapa Prakkamakul พรนภา ปรักกมกุล 陳可意 (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and landscape architect based in Massachusetts. Inspired by her multinational background, Ponnapa’s work explores the relationship between humans and their environment, focusing on cultural displacement and a sense of belonging. Using found materials foraged from landscapes and stories collected from local communities, Ponnapa aims to create place-specific artwork that tells stories of the place and amplifies voices from those communities.  

Ponnapa holds a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design where she received the Lowthorpe Fellowship Award upon graduation. She is also a recipient of Fay Chandler Emerging Artist Award and David Bethuel Jamieson Fellowship. Her past artist residencies include Mount Auburn Cemetery, Boston Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Urbano Project, Umbrella Arts Center, Provincetown Community Compact, and Manoog Family Artist-in-Resident at the Plumbing Museum with four paintings in the museum’s permanent collection.  

For public art projects, Ponnapa collaborated with local organizations including the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Greenway Conservancy, Harvard Ed Portal, Boston Public Art Triennial, Downtown Boston Alliance, Pao Arts Center, Sommerville Art Council, City of Cambridge Community Development Department, and Perkins School for the Blind. Her work has been featured in the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Boston Arts Review, GBH, and the Provincetown Banner. 

About Fallingwater Institute

When Edgar Kaufmann jr. entrusted Fallingwater to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963, he envisioned Fallingwater not only as a place where visitors would come to experience great architecture, but also where a deeper experience of art, design and nature might occur.

Kaufmann imagined that Fallingwater could become a place where artists, scholars, designers and learners might come to find inspiration from the building and its landscape while pursuing individual or group study. Today, the Fallingwater Institute, formally established in 2015, honors that vision by providing a stimulating location for creative collaboration and inspired thinking through immersive classes, workshops and residencies. By serving an international community through its innovative programming, the Fallingwater Institute works to create and disseminate new ideas that promote harmony between people and nature.