Christine Astorino
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Christine Astorino is the founder and president of New Dawn Garden Design LLC, a Pittsburgh-based company she founded in March 2006. Ms. Astorino received her Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from the Pennsylvania State University in 1995. Prior to founding New Dawn, Ms. Astorino was a senior principal with Astorino, an architecture, engineering, interior design, design-build firm based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She began her work there as a landscape architect. In 2002, Ms. Astorino became the Senior Vice-President of Corporate Marketing. Ms. Astorino’s projects can be found throughout the US, Europe, and New Zealand, including: the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, Vatican City, Italy; UPMC Civico Transplant Hospital, Palermo, Sicily; Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA; PNC Park, Pittsburgh, PA; and PNC Operations Center and Park, Pittsburgh, PA. She has served on the Board of Trustees for Phipps Conservatory and Botanic Gardens as well as Western Pennsylvania Audubon Society and Pressley Ridge. She has also been active in the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, Western Pennsylvania Botanic Garden, The Carnegie Museum of Art, and The Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

Carolyn D. Bennett
Los Angeles, California

Ms. Bennett is a native of Evanston, Illinois. She has had careers in the television production field working for ABC and also as a freelance writer. She holds a Masters Degree in the Conservation of Historic Landscapes, Parks, and Gardens from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. She writes and lectures frequently on historic landscape conservation and garden history issues and owns her own garden consultancy business, cdb gardens. Carolyn is a Trustee of the Los Angeles County Arboretum Foundation and a founding member of the Garden School Foundation. She is the mother of three grown children and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Jamie.

website: cdb gardens

Sarah S. Boasberg
Washington, DC

Mrs. Boasberg received her BA from Smith College and a Certificate in Landscape Design from George Washington University. She was the 2007 recipient of the ASLA’s LaGasse Medal in the Non-Landscape Architect category for her leadership in conservancy of natural resources and public landscapes. Mrs. Boasberg, a founding Co-Chairman of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, has served as Chairman of the American Horticultural Society and was Vice President of the Friends of the National Arboretum. She has taught courses on the history of landscape and garden design at George Washington University. In addition, she has served as a trustee of Smith College, Knox College, The Washington Opera, and the National Cathedral School.

Sheila A. Brady FASLA
Washington, DC

Sheila Brady has been practicing as a landscape architect since 1978 after graduating from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design with a Masters of Landscape Architecture degree. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from George Washington University, and studied Fine Arts at the Corcoran School of Art. Ms. Brady joined Oehme, van Sweden & Associates in 1987 and was made a Partner in 1998. Ms. Brady's recent accomplishments as Principal-in-Charge include the Lakeside Gardens at the Chicago Botanic Garden, a 12-acre project which features a five-acre island surrounded by lakeside and aquatic gardens; and the World War II Memorial, which occupies a prestigious site between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC. She was also the Principal-in-Charge for North Point Meadows, a 10-acre waterfront park on the Charles River in Boston, Massachusetts. Among her other design credits are the Federal National Mortgage Corporation's 31-one acre corporate headquarters campus in McLean, Virginia; a memorial garden at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia; the Parkside community, a 10-acre, 100-unit housing complex in Washington, DC, which includes associated commercial and institutional services; and award-winning private gardens and estates in the Washington, DC metropolitan area; Newport, Rhode Island; and Boston, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, Massachusetts. Prior to joining Oehme, van Sweden & Associates, Ms. Brady worked with EDAW Inc. Mrs. Brady has taught landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and is a frequent guest juror at the University of Virginia. She is a registered Landscape Architect and is distinguished as 'Fellow' of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

website: Oehme, van Sweden & Associates, Inc.

Laura A. Burnett ASLA, LEED AP
San Diego, California

Laura Burnett is a landscape architect with over 20 years of experience in a broad range of projects for public agencies, universities and multi-agency organizations. A graduate of Colorado State University and Harvard Graduate School of Design, Ms. Burnett is a principal with WRT in the San Diego office. She serves as Chair of San Diego's Historical Resource Board. Ms. Burnett has led numerous project teams, which have included architects, engineers, public artists and citizen advisory committees. Her work in the planning and design of communities, urban parks, campuses, transit-oriented facilities, and regional open space networks focuses on the cultural, functional and aesthetic interface of human activity and natural systems. Projects of note include the Vision Plan for City Park New Orleans; Palisades Park (Los Angles Conservancy, Preservation Award - Royce Neuschantz Award for Historic Landscapes, 2000); and South Beach, Santa Monica (ASLA National Award for Design 2002).

website: Wallace Roberts & Todd

Meredith Arms Bzdak PhD
Princeton, New Jersey

Meredith Arms Bzdak holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Mount Holyoke College and a PhD in Art History from Rutgers University. She is currently the Architectural Historian and Director of Business Development for Farewell Mills Gatsch Architects, LLC in Princeton, New Jersey. Dr. Bzdak has over twenty years of experience in the field of historic preservation and has produced numerous documents pertaining to historic architecture. She is a Part-Time Lecturer at Rutgers University in the Art History Department, where she teaches classes on the development of the modern city and the preservation of the recent past, and is a member of the Advisory Board for Drew University’s Historic Preservation Program. Dr. Bzdak is the Chair Emeritus and Member of the Board of Advisors of the National Alliance of Preservation Commissions. She is the author of Public Sculpture in New Jersey; Monuments to Collective Identity.

website: Farewell Mills Gatsch Architects, LLC

Leslie Rose Close
Bridgehampton, New York

A native New Yorker, Leslie Rose Close is a landscape historian and the former Director of the Program in American Landscape History at Wave Hill, in the Bronx. There, she co-founded the Catalog of Landscape Records in the United States, the first database for American landscape documents, now housed at the New York Botanical Garden. She has served on the Board of Advisors for the Society of Architectural Historians Landscape Chapter, and the Advisory Board of the Garden Book Club of the New York Review of Books. She has been active on review and selection committees for architecture and landscape architecture for the Parrish Art Museum, of which she is an Honorary Trustee. She has written, edited, lectured, and taught courses on the history of women in landscape architecture; the history of earthworks and land art;the history and theory of landscape architecture; and photography and the designed landscape.She holds a BA in Art from Hunter College, a Certificate in Horticulture from Penn State, and a M.A. from New York University. She is a passionate organic gardener, in Bridgehampton, New York.

 

Kurt Culbertson
Aspen, Colorado

Mr. Culbertson is a native of Shreveport, Louisiana, and received his undergraduate degree in landscape architecture from Louisiana State University and a Masters in Business Administration in Real Estate from Southern Methodist University. He currently serves as Chairman and CEO of Design Workshop, a landscape architecture and land planning firm with office throughout the western United States and South America, and most recently, Asheville, North Carolina. In addition to his professional pursuits, Mr. Culbertson has written the biography of George Kessler and completed extensive research on the contributions of German-American landscape designers to the evolution of the profession in this country.

Barbara S. Dixon
New York, New York

Ms, Dixon began her career on Wall Street in 1970 at a firm called Hayden Stone, which later morphed into Shearson Lehman Brothers where she became a Managing Director. Her expertise is in futures trading, as a money manager (CTA). She managed several commodity funds, lectured about the futures markets throughout the US, in London, and in Tokyo, and wrote a weekly market letter for Shearson Lehman clients. Mrs. Dixon left Lehman in 1992, and after a brief period at Smith Barney, she left Wall Street. Mrs. Dixon has served on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Futures Trading Advisors, the Board of Directors of the New York Futures Exchange, the Board of Directors of FINEX and a trustee of the Futures Industry Institute. A graduate of Vassar College and a history major, Mrs. Dixon considered a career in urban planning before she became drawn to trading. Since leaving Wall Street she has become a Vice Chairman of New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy/research organization that promotes the import of well maintained, well programmed parks for New York City. Mrs. Dixon lives in Manhattan and Stonington, CT, on a 260 acre farm called Manatuck.

Julie Donnell
Fort Wayne, Indiana

Ms. Donnell teaches voice at Indiana University - Purdue University, Ft. Wayne Campus. She is Founder and President of the Friends of the Parks of Allen County, a not -for -profit organization that has successfully partnered with the Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation Department to produce 8 cutural landscape reports for its historic park and boulevard system, as well as to raise substantial funds for the parks. The Friends have recently expanded their mission to partner with the City of Fort Wayne to advance issues of quality of life and walkability in the downtown. She is a member of the Historic Preservation Review Board for the State of Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

Shaun Saer Duncan
Cincinnatti, Ohio

Ms. Duncan is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana . She received a BA degree in English literature from the University of Virginia and a JD from Tulane University School of Law. Ms. Duncan has been a law clerk in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana, and has practiced law in the areas of real property and trademark rights. She is a past trustee of River Fields, Inc., a river conservation organization in Louisville, Kentucky. She is a board member of the Cincinnati Horticultural Society and is active in the Garden Club of America.

Mary Ellen Flanagan ASLA
Jamestown, Rhode Island

Ms. Flanagan is currently engaged in several design projects in Rhode Island, including the design of the Conservatory and Greenhouse interior landscapes and the new Botanical Center at Roger Williams Park, Providence. She has recently completed the restoration of the Historic Japanese Garden and master plan of tree planting with the park. She participated in the Quinque Fellows program in Edinburgh Scotland during the summer of 2001 where she collaborated with other historic preservation professionals at Historic Scotland at Holyrood Park and Palace, The Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh, The National Trust for Scotland, gaining insight to the landscape preservation techniques utilized in Scotland. Ms. Flanagan received a BLA from the University of Rhode Island. She is currently a member of the Waterfront Park Design Competition Committee for a proposed eight-acre park in Downtown Providence and is the past president of Rhode Island ASLA Chapter.

Rebecca Frischkorn
Washington, D.C.

Rebecca Frischkorn is executive producer and host of GardenStory- Inspiring Spaces, Healing Places, a 10-episode television series about how gardens have the power to change our lives. The series debuted on PBS stations across the country in April 2008. The series explores such diverse gardens as a the Lynchburg, Virginia garden of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, a 35-acre Nature Conservancy preserve in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia, the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis and community gardens in the East Village of New York City. Rebecca Frischkorn earned an AB degree in Classics at Princeton University, and pursued Landscape Architecture at Ohio State University. She has designed gardens for over 30 years in Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, DC, and Maine. She is the co-author, along with Reuben M. Rainey, of "Half My World- The Garden of Anne Spencer, A History and Guide," which in 2004 was granted a prestigious National Honor Award by the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Mac Keith Griswold
New York, New York

Ms. Griswold is a journalist and garden historian, was graduated from McGill University with a BA, attended the Radcliffe Seminars in Landscape Design and studied horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden. She has taught landscape and garden history at Sarah Lawrence College, where she was a recipient of the Noble Chair in Art and Cultural History, and has guest lectured on gardens and landscape as cultural history at the School of Environmental Design, University of Georgia and the School of Environmental Design, University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Pleasures of the Garden, Images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Harry N. Abrams, 1987) examines the museum's collections of garden-related works. Her second, The Golden Age of American Gardens: Proud Owners, Private Estates 1890-1940 (Harry N. Abrams, 1991), written with Eleanor Weller, is a nationwide study of American plutocratic gardens of the period. Washington's Gardens at Mount Vernon: Landscape of the Inner Man (Houghton Mifflin, Inc., 1999) looks at the character of George Washington through the medium of his landscape, garden and farming activity. She is currently the Director of Archival Research at the Sylvester Manor Project, Shelter Island, NY, where the papers and the site date to the earliest European colonization of America. Her fourth book, tentatively titled Slaves in the Attic, Rediscovering Sylvester Manor, a Seventeenth-Century Plantation on Long Island (Houghton Mifflin, Inc.), will appear in 2005. She writes frequently for magazines and journals, and for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Times Literary Supplement She is a co-chair of the Sag Harbor Tree Fund, which plants trees throughout the village of Sag Harbor, on Long Island, NY.