Agata Stafiej-Bartosik is a sociologist, writer, and social entrepreneur working at the intersection of culture, environmental humanities, and social innovation. Her work explores how everyday landscapes — especially gardens — and plants carry cultural memory, identity, and hidden systems of meaning.
She develops interdisciplinary projects that combine narrative writing, research, and visual documentation. Her writing moves between botany and biography, between the history of a single plant species and the broader social and political forces that shaped its journey across continents and centuries.
An Ashoka Fellow and graduate of the English Gardening School at the Chelsea Botanical Garden, she brings together the rigour of social science and the attentiveness of a gardener. Her current projects include Lost Jewish Gardens — an interdisciplinary reconstruction of erased garden landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe — and Writers' Gardens, an essay-and-photography portrait of contemporary Polish writers and their relationship with place and nature, co-created with photographer Jan Brykczyński.
She is currently planning a garden at House 88 under the direction of Daniel Libeskind. Her essay on the garden of Hedwig Höss at the villa beside Auschwitz was written for the English School of Gardening at the Chelsea Botanical Garden and has been widely read as a contribution to the literature of gardens, memory, and moral landscape.
Credentials & Affiliations
Ashoka Fellow
Global network of leading social entrepreneurs
Chelsea Botanical Garden
English Gardening School — garden history & design
SGGW Warsaw
Garden design studies under Dr Daria Szarejko-Worobiej
Sociologist
Researcher at the intersection of culture and environment