Kenneth Helphand, FASLA, Philip H. Knight Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture, retired from the University of Oregon in 2012 after forty years of teaching history, theory, and design. He is a graduate of Brandeis University and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Helphand’s books include Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime (2006), which won several awards, including the Foundation for Landscape Studies 2007 J. B. Jackson Prize, as well as Colorado: Visions of an American Landscape (1991), Yard Street Park (1996 with Cynthia Girling), Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture and the Making of the Israeli Landscape (2002), Lawrence Halprin (2017) and Hops (2020). Helphand served as editor of Landscape Journal from 1994-2002, and was Chair of Senior Fellows, Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Studies, Harvard University. In 2013, a symposium, “Landscape Thinking,” was held in Helphand’s honor in Eugene, Oregon. The symposium brought together top scholars of landscape architecture to enlighten, delight, and inspire students, professionals, faculty members, practitioners, alumni, and friends. The speakers included Cynthia Girling, Walter Hood, Ben Helphand, Alisa Braudo, Liska Chan, Tal Alon Mozes, Laurie Olin, Anne Spirn, abd Marc Treib.

Dr. Sarah Lopez is a built environment historian and migration scholar and is currently an Associate Professor at the Weitzman School of Design at University of Pennsylvania. Lopez' book, The Remittance Landscape: The Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015 and won the 2017 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Lopez was awarded a Princeton-Mellon fellowship, an Urban Landscape Studies fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks, and a Center for the Study of Visual Arts fellowship.

Lopez is working on two books examining the history of migrant incarceration in the U.S. and tracking the development over the last fifty years of a network of Mexican stonemasons, quarry workers, homebuilders, architects, and businessmen who primarily provide services to Mexican and Mexican-American clientele in the American Southwest.

Jane Wolff (on research leave for 2024 cycle) is a professor at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Her most recent book, Bay Lexicon, is an exploration in the place-based language around the San Francisco Bay. By diving into the complex meaning of words associated with a specific place, Wolff studies and attempts to classify phenomena throughout the Bay. The book was a winner of the 2022 LSI Book Prize. Previous publications include the edited volume Landscape Citizenships (co-editors: Tim Waterman and Ed Wall); the web resource Gutter to Gulf (co-authors: Elise Shelley and Derek Hoeferlin); and the book and deck of playing cards Delta Primer: a field guide to the California Delta. Wolff has been featured at the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art, the Exploratorium, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Wolff is a member of the advisory board of the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute and served on the Design Review Board of Waterfront Toronto and the advisory board of BEAT (Building Equality in Architecture Toronto). Her current research focuses on developing and decolonizing landscape observation methods throughout Toronto.

Wolff is the 2022 recipient of the Margolese Design for Living Prize. This award celebrates an inspiring Canadian designer whose work in the built environment improves the lives of people and their communities.

Elizabeth Meyer, FASLA, Merrill D. Peterson Professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, is the Chair of the UVA Landscape Studies Initiative annual book awards program. Meyer, a landscape architect, has been fascinated by the thick description of landscapes—places replete with cultural memories and biophysical processes—since encountering historic sites along the coast from New England to Puerto Rico during her nomadic childhood. Her graduate degrees in landscape architecture and historic preservation, from the University of Virginia and Cornell University respectively, prepared her for professional opportunities to collaborate on significant projects such as the University of Virginia Academical Village, Bryant Park NYC, the National Zoo in Washington DC, Wellesley College campus in Massachusetts, and the St. Louis Gateway Arch Grounds. In 1988, Meyer left professional practice and began a career as a scholar and educator, first at Harvard Graduate School of Design, and since 1993 at the University of Virginia where she teaches design studios and graduate seminars on cultural landscapes and contemporary design theory. She has published widely in scholar journals and anthologies; in 2018, the European Journal of Landscape Architecture dedicated a special issue to an assessment of Meyer’s influential manifesto Sustaining Beauty, a mediation on the entanglement of landscape aesthetics and environmental ethics. In recognition of Meyer’s accomplishments, she was selected by President Obama to serve on the US Commission of Fine Arts (2012-2020) and received the Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum in 2019.

Meyer founded the UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes in 2016 as a collaborative hub for scholars and practitioners seeking to create new cultural landscape approaches to research, interpretation, preservation and design. Early CCL projects include What’s Out there Richmond, a collaboration with The Cultural Landscape Foundation, the Central Virginia Piedmont Food Heritage Cultural Landscape Atlas, the Race and Public Space. Commemorative Practices in the American South symposium and the Towards a Charlottesville Cultural Landscape Colloquium. In August 2022, Meyer and the LSI team, launched the beta version of an open-source digital landscape history text, Landscape Design. A Cultural and Architectural History, that was funded by the Andrew D. Mellon Foundation, the UVA Alumni Association Jefferson Trust, and the UVA School of Architecture. This project will continue to evolve with the addition of new content and features thanks to a generous legacy gift from the Foundation for Landscape Studies.