Ethan Carr
Ethan Carr has been active in historical research and landscape preservation practice for over twenty years. He has traveled and worked in the national park system extensively, but began his career in New York working for the Central Park Conservancy and New York Parks & Recreation. Carr is currently an assistant professor in the department of landscape architecture and regional planning at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Virginia, and the Bard Graduate Center. He has previously worked as a historian and landscape designer for private design offices, New York City Parks & Recreation, and for the National Park Service where he was the lead historical landscape architect at the Denver Service Center. Carr holds a M.A. in Art History from Columbia University, a Masters in Landscape Architecture from Harvard University, and a PhD in landscape architecture from the Edinburgh College of Art. His book, Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service, received an ASLA honor award in 1998. Carr has contributed to numerous other books and written articles on the history, design and management of historic parks and other cultural landscapes. His new book, Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma, will be published in June 2007 by the Library of American Landscape History and the University of Massachusetts Press.

Andrew Darrell
In addition to serving as director of the New York Region at Environmental Defense, Andrew Darrell is also the co-director of Environmental Defense's Living Cities program. Living Cities creates practical solutions to the environmental challenges of urban areas, where half the world's population lives today. Darrell was previously Executive Director of the Waterfront Park Coalition, an alliance of environmental and community groups dedicated to revitalization of waterfront neighborhoods in New York City's five boroughs. He has also served as Executive Director of the Hudson River Park Alliance, which played a leading role in creating a new five-mile waterfront park in Manhattan. Darrell holds a J.D. from the University of Virginia and a Masters degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and is a trustee of the Van Alen Institute and of Columbia University's International House.

Patricia Harris
Prior to her appointment as First Deputy Mayor, Patricia Harris managed Bloomberg LP's Corporate Communications Department since 1994, overseeing its Philanthropy, Public Relations, and Governmental Affairs divisions. Prior to her employment at Bloomberg, she was Vice President for Public Relations at Serino Coyne Advertising, where she helped create, plan, and execute new public relations strategies for corporate and non-profit clients. Ms. Harris began her career in public service in 1977 as an Assistant to Congressman Koch. Upon Koch's election as Mayor, she became an Assistant to the Deputy Mayor in 1979, and subsequently was appointed Assistant to the Mayor for federal affairs. From 1983 to 1990, she was Executive Director of the City's Art Commission.

Marian Heiskell
Biography will be posted shortly.

Walter Hood
Walter Hood is Professor and former Chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and principal of Hood Design in Oakland, CA. Hood has worked in a variety of settings including architecture, urban design, community planning, environmental art, and research. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in Landscape Architecture in1997, and has exhibited and lectured on his professional projects and theoretical works nationally and abroad. Hood’s work was recently featured in the exhibition and publication, “Open: New Designs For Public Spaces” at the Van Alen Institute, NY; Metropolis Magazine; the New York Times; and Dwell Magazine. His firm designed the gardens and landscape for the new De Young Museum, San Francisco with Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron.

Walter Hood’s published monographs Urban Diaries and Blues & Jazz Landscape Improvisations illuminate his unique approach to the design of urban landscapes. These works won an ASLA Research award in 1996. His essay “Macon Memories” is featured in Sites of Memory, Princeton Architectural Press, 2001. Hood participated in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “Revelatory Landscapes” Exhibition 2000-2001. He is currently researching and writing a book entitled Urban Landscapes; American Landscape Typologies. His area of teaching, the American Urban Landscape, is intertwined with his design work creating a didactic approach to the design of urban landscapes. .

Peter Latz
Peter Latz established his landscape architecture and planning studio with his wife Anneliese in 1968. In 1988 the studio became Latz + Partner, and in 2001 their son Tilman, architect and landscape architect, joined the office as a third partner. Well known for their integrative work on town-planning and urban design, large-scale landscape architecture projects, planning of open space and ecological building, Latz + Partner has won numerous awards including the First European Prize for Landscape Architecture Rosa Barba, the Grande Médaille d’Urbanisme of the Académie d’Architecture Paris and the EDRA Places Award 2005. Latz + Partner stand not only for quality of design but also for technical competence and know-how. Since the mid 1980s a focus of the work has been re-conversion of post-industrial sites. With the award-winning project “Landscape Park Duisburg Nord” – the metamorphosis of a large industrial brownfield into a people’s park and vivid part of the city – Latz + Partner has gained world-wide reputation and was featured in numerous national and international publications and exhibitions including the Venice Architectural Biennale 1996, CCCB’s “Reconquest of Europe – Urban Public Space 1980–99,” several exhibitions at Harvard University between 1998 and 2003, and the Museum of Modern Art’s “Groundswell – Constructing the Contemporary Landscape” in 2005.

Peter Latz was born in Darmstadt, Germany and graduated from the Technical University of Munich. After postgraduate research and studio work in urban planning at the RWTH Aachen, he completed his studies in 1968. At that time he also started his academic career as a lecturer at the Academie van Bouwkunst in Maastricht (Netherlands), continuing his teaching activities as professor and later chair at the University of Kassel. For the past 23 years Latz has been the chair of landscape architecture and planning at the Technical University of Munich. He is additionally an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania and has been a guest professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

John Loring
John Loring is the Design Director of Tiffany & Co. In addition to being an accomplished designer whose contributions to Tiffany have been widely recognized, Mr. Loring is a talented artist and author of many books on Tiffany's celebrated history. Among them are Tiffany in Fashion, Tiffany Flora/Tiffany Fauna, Louis Comfort Tiffany at Tiffany & Co., Magnificent Tiffany Silver, Paulding Farnham: Tiffany's Lost Genius, Tiffany Jewels, and Tiffany's 20th Century: A Portrait of American Style. Prior to joining Tiffany in 1979, Mr. Loring served as the New York bureau chief of Architectural Digest,. Mr. Loring earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Yale University in 1960.

Anuradha Mathur
Anuradha Mathur, with her partner Dilip da Cunha, has focused her design practice for the past decade on cultural and ecological issues of contentious landscapes. Their investigations have taken them to diverse terrains including the Lower Mississippi, New York, Sundarbans, Rio Grande, and Bangalore. Ms. Mathur is an architect and landscape architect. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, and holds a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelors of Architecture from CEPT, Ahmedabad. Ms. Mathur is co-author with Dilip da Cunha of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (Yale University Press, 2001) that looks beyond objectifying the Mississippi as a river, and draws out a more dynamic and layered landscape that demands negotiation more than control. Mississippi Floods also took the form of a public exhibition that traveled extensively in the U.S. and London. Their practice received the Young Architects Award for 2000 given by the Architectural League of New York. Their awarded projects are part of a publication by Princeton Architectural Press and the Architectural League titled Second Nature. Mathur and da Cunha's most recent book, Deccan Traverses: the Making of Bangalore's Terrain (Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006), was released in June 2006. It follows a public exhibition held in the Glass House of Lalbagh, Bangalore, in October 2004. The book and exhibition bring together a unique and extensive documentation of Bangalore's history and landscape agency, and is directed toward an innovative design strategy for Bangalore and its extended region.

Wendy Paulson
Wendy Paulson's career has been in teaching, beginning in the Boston Public Schools; later at The Potomac School in McLean, VA, and in the Barrington (IL) Public Schools (as "The Nature Lady"); and as director of education for a community conservation group. Most recently, she taught year-long bird classes in two New York City public schools. Ms. Paulson serves as educational associate and trustee of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology; trustee of her local church; member of the National Council of the Student Conservation Association and Advisory Council of New York City Audubon Society. She is former chairman and life trustee of the Illinois chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), former chairman of the New York Chapter of TNC and former vice chairman of TNC's international Board of Governors. She has served as president of two community conservation organizations, authored a nature activity series for children, edited a conservation newsletter for 10 years and has been a longtime participant in prairie and savanna restoration. Ms. Paulson led public bird walks for over 15 years in Illinois and 10 years in New York City. Ms. Paulson and her husband, Hank, live in Washington, DC and have two grown children. They are avid hikers, cyclists, and kayakers.

Steward Pickett
Biography will be posted shortly.

Adi Shamir
Adi Shamir is the Executive Director of the Van Alen Institute. Prior to her position at the Institute, Ms. Shamir served as the Dean of Undergraduate Studies at California College of the Arts (CCA) where she led programs in the fine arts, design, architecture and writing disciplines. Ms. Shamir has taught at CCA as an Associate Professor of Architecture since 1991, and has also taught at Cooper Union, Rice University, U.C. Berkeley, and the College of Marin, Kentfield. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Cooper Union School and Master of Architecture degree from University of California, Berkeley. Ms. Shamir's design practice has focused on cross-disciplinary collaborations with artists and designers taking the form of theoretical architectural projects, built environments, interactive media educational programs, stage sets and exhibition installations. Ms. Shamir's architectural and historical research explores early Modernist themes; published works include Open House: Unbound Space and the Modern Dwelling (Rizzoli 2002), as well as multiple international architectural journals and edited publications.

Mark Wigley
Biography will be posted shortly.

Patricia Kempthorne
Patricia J. Kempthorne is Founder and Executive Director of the Twiga Foundation, Inc., a non-profit corporation dedicated to inspiring, promoting and maintaining family-consciousness at home, in the workplace and in the community. While serving as the First Lady of Idaho from 1999 to 2006, Kempthorne volunteered her time as a leading advocate for family and children’s issues. She continues to work with a number of programs with a special focus on the prevention of substance abuse in communities. Mrs. Kempthorne now resides in Washington DC with her husband, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne, and works to raise the profile of the National Park Service.

Lindy Roy
South African-born Lindy Roy founded ROY Co. in New York in 2000. Projects of note include Cairnhill Circle Towers, three twenty-story towers sited in a layered, interwoven landscape in Singapore; Highline 519, an eleven-story residential building in New York; Gallery Met, a new contemporary visual arts gallery at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center; the headquarters for Vitra USA; Andre Balazs’s Hotel QT in Times Square; L’Oreal’s Living Labs; the Poolhouse in Sagaponac, New York; and Okavango Delta Spa in Botswana. ROY Co. was included in a group of internationally recognized architects commissioned by the New York Times Magazine to reconceptualize the development of the World Trade Center vicinity one year after 9/11.

In ROY Co.’s work, nature is objectified and even simulated to create a scenery of leisure. In subWave, the winning design in the 2001 MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program, the courtyard of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is transformed into an urban oasis using a series of micro-climates featuring wind, water and shade.

A permanent resident of the United States, Lindy Roy moved to New York to complete an M.Arch from Columbia University in 1990 after receiving a B.Arch from the University of Cape Town in 1985. ROY Co.’s work has been exhibited in The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2001), The Cooper Hewitt Design Museum (2002), Artists Space (2002) and The Museum of Berlin (2004). In 2003 its work was featured in a solo exhibition entitled ROY/Design Series 1 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The firm has been published widely in the US and internationally, appearing in the New York Times, Vogue, ID Magazine, Surface, Frame, Blueprint, and Condé Nast Traveler.