Rosetta S. Elkin, MLA, FAAR, PHD

Rosetta S. Elkin is the Principle of Practice Landscape, academic director of Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture Master’s in Landscape Architecture (MLA) program, and an Associate of The Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University. Rosetta’s work considers living environments with a particular focus on plant life and climate change. Rosetta teaches planting design, fieldwork, and seminars that advance a theory of plant life between ecology and horticulture. In her work, Rosetta engenders access to plant knowledge by prioritizing public exhibitions, living installations, maintenance plans and open access publishing. Among her awards, Rosetta is the recipient of the 2018 Garden Club of America Rome Prize in landscape architecture, The Harvard University Climate Change Award, and has received support ranging from The Graham Foundation for the Arts to the Rockefeller Foundation.

She is author and co-author of books, articles, book chapters, and monographs including Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation (University of Minnesota 2022), how afforestation reveals the often-concealed politics between humans and plants. Landscapes of Retreat (K.Verlag 2022), portraits of climate adaptation. Tiny Taxonomy (Actar 2017), a publication that reflects on the scale of individual plants in practice through a reading of three gardens.

Her design work is exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Les Jardins de Metis, Chelsea Garden Festival, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and featured in a range of publications including Journal of Landscape Architecture, New Geographies, and Lotus International. Rosetta is committed to design as a means to address the risk, injustice, and instability brought about by the shifts in our shared climate and welcomes projects that heighten the awareness of plant life.

For more about Rosetta please visit her faculty page

 Emily Hicks, MLA

Emily Hicks is a Partner at Practice Landscape. Her work explores how temporal and historical land management creates and limits the landscape, and how landscape thinking can provide greater access to the living environment. Currently, Emily is managing the ecological assessment of a site in northern Minnesota that includes archival research, drone data collection and analysis, and local partnership to create a ecological assessment to support an adaptive management plan. Emily is the recipient of the Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize at Harvard Graduate School of Design for her co-authored thesis “Wild Rice Waters." An article expanding on the subject was published in Places Journal. 

Emily is the President of the Practice Foundation. For more information about the grant please visit Practice Grant. 

Sarah Diamond, MLA

Sarah Diamond is a Project Manager at Practice Landscape. Her work examines the intersection of representation, memory, and maintenance in landscape practice and discourse. Currently, Sarah manages the landscape strategy and long-term landscape succession of a post-agricultural site in Libertyville, Illinois. This project includes close collaboration with hydrologists and ecologists as the highly disturbed site is analyzed and, over time, with the adaptation of maintenance practices, woodlands, meadowlands, and forestlands succeed agricultural fields. Sarah a Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a former co-chair of Womxn in Design, and co-organizer of the 2018 Convergence at the Confluence of Power, Identity & Design. She continues her longstanding art practice, working in oil to reconcile the spatial and the imagined.

Joanna Lombard, AIA, LEED AP

Joanna Lombard is a registered architect (Florida) and Professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture with a joint appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Miller School of Medicine. Her scholarship explores the influence of the cultural landscape on living environments with focus on climate migration and managed retreat in relation to the transformation of South Florida. An Abess Faculty Scholar in the Leonard and Jayne Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy, she is a founding member of the Built-Environment Behavior & Health Research Group with funded projects in the area of neighborhood design and health, currently studying the impacts of streetscape-greening on Miami-Dade Medicare beneficiaries. She is author and co-author of articles, book chapters, and publications that address a public awareness of the cultural landscape, using historical studies to inform the future. She is co-leader of one of the eleven university-based teams selected as charter members of the American Institute of Architects Design & Health Research Consortium, and a member of the University of Miami U-LINK team exploring “Hyper-localism: Transforming the Paradigm for Climate Adaptation.” Joanna enjoys working with other universities and scholars to shape policy and influence the public realm. In this capacity she has worked recently with colleagues at Georgetown University, The CLEO/Van Alen Institute Climate Design Lab, and The Nature Conservancy, and currently with the HyLo team is working with community partners at Catalyst Miami and CLEO.

For more about Joanna please visit her faculty page

Collaborators past and present: 

Marissa Angell (MLA/registered landscape architect) is an experienced Senior Project Manager skilled at managing, designing, and assisting in the construction of both public and private landscapes. Marissa derives inspiration from wild plants, natural forms, and processes, all of which feature heavily in her work.

Mark Heller (MLA) is a Design Critic in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His work explores geographic analysis, data visualization, and simulation.

Dane Carlson (MLA) is a landscape designer and researcher based in the United States and Nepal, currently working as an environmental design strategist at UNOPS Nepal and Visiting Assistant Professor at Principia College.

Mariel Collard Arias (MLA) is a landscape and architecture practitioner and researcher based in Mexico, currently working as a Lecturer at Pratt Institute.

Catherine Auger, Juna Pfeifer, Emily Beach, Elena Thoman, Melissa Eloshway, Gracie Villa, Dana Hills, Parawee Wachirabuntoon