Introducing TCLF’s 2024 Summer Fellows
TCLF is pleased to welcome two recent Master of Landscape Architecture graduates, Maren Louttit Johnson and Amy Reid, to its Summer 2024 Fellowship Program. Each was selected from a diverse and impressive pool of nearly 50 applicants.
Maren Louttit Johnson is this year’s Sally Boasberg Founder’s Fellow. The fellowship was established to honor the invaluable contributions that TCLF’s Founding Co-Chair Sally Boasberg made to landscape stewardship, patronage, and education throughout her life.
Originally from Tallahassee, Florida, Maren earned a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from Cornell University in 2023. Her early life in the south revealed the importance of place and environment to addressing questions of social equity and justice. After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Ecology and Biodiversity, and Spanish from the University of the South in 2017 she served as a Research Technician at the Fire Science Lab at Tall Timbers Research Station in Tallahassee. She assisted with a range of prescribed fire experiments and applications, informing her “design-through-management” approach to practice.
Maren additionally worked as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant in Três Lagoas, Brazil, where she became interested in the design of rural landscapes. She continues to explore this interest through her work with Liminal, an organization of young design professionals that explores new futures for depopulated and underserved small cities and towns. She hopes to combine her diverse interests in pursuit of a PhD, exploring how the Land Back Movement can inform design and management in landscape architecture.
As a Boasberg Fellow, Maren will return to her southern roots, researching cultural landscapes central to African American experiences in cities including Richmond, Virginia, and Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to helping expand the What’s Out There Guide to African American Cultural Landscapes, Maren looks forward to contributing to Landslide 2024: Demonstration Grounds.
Amy Reid is the 2024 Danette Gentile Kauffmann Fellow, based this year at Mithun's office in Seattle, Washington. Amy earned a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from Utah State University in May 2024. Her master’s thesis explored Robert Smithson’s enduring influence on the field of landscape architecture. Drawing on her experience as a research historian, Amy collaborated with the Dia Art Foundation and the Holt/Smithson Foundation to prepare a National Register of Historic Places Nomination for the artist’s iconic earthwork, Spiral Jetty, as part of her thesis. Amy is interested in the powerful role cultural landscapes and public spaces serve as places of connection and healing for individuals and communities. As a west-coast native, Amy looks forward to researching, documenting and photographing culturally and ecologically significant landscape that will lay for the foundation for a future What’s Out There Weekend in Seattle.
