Thaisa Way: Teaching Design as Art and Practice

Dr. Thaisa Way, FASLA, FAAR (BS UCB, M'Arch UVa, PHD Cornell University), serves as Director of Garden & Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, a Harvard University research institution in Washington DC and PI for a Mellon Humanities in Place Initiative, “Democracy and Landscape: Race, Identity, and Difference.” She is Professor Emerita in Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington and serves on the faculty of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. She is a core leader for the Built Environment Deans/ Directors Advancing Change initiative that nurtures a diverse community of emerging scholars teaching and researching the built environment. Dr. Way was a 2016 Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome. Dr. Way served as the founding Director of Urban@UW, an initiative of the University of Washington. Her book, Unbounded Practices: Women, Landscape Architecture, and Early Twentieth Century Design (UVa Press, 2009/213) was awarded the J.B. Jackson Book Award.  Other books include From Modern Space to Urban Ecological Design: the Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag (UW Press 2015); a co-edited  volume with Ken Yocom, Ben Spencer, and Jeff Hou Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here (Routledge 2014), the edited collection River Cities/ City Rivers (Harvard Press 2018) and a collaborative project, GGN 1999-2018 (Timber Press, 2018). Her most recent books include the volume co-edited with Eric Avila, Segregation and Resistance in the Urban Landscape (2023) and the collected essays for Garden as Art: Beatrix Farrand at Dumbarton Oaks (2022) and a forthcoming volume co-edited with Carlyn Ferrari, Black Women’s Gardens as Art and Practice. Dr. Way seeks to challenge the canon of landscape architecture to engage with the inscriptions of race, gender, and class on the profession, practice, and pedagogy of the field.

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