Leah Kahler

Landscape designer and researcher Leah Kahler has been appointed the 2024-2025 McHarg Fellow in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Weitzman School. Kahler is a landscape designer and researcher whose work is motivated by justice-oriented storytelling though the lens of landscape. Her research explores the socioecological legacies of the plantation landscape, focused on sites of labor, extraction, and production in the American south.

Kahler received a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia, where her research as a Benjamin C. Howland fellow explored the possibilities of an abolition ecology through speculative fictions at the site currently known as the Louisiana State Penitentiary. She was a 2021 Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar finalist, and she received the LAF Honor Scholarship in Memory of Joe Lalli, FASLA.

Kahler joins Weitzman from Reed Hilderbrand's practice in Boston, where she played a key role in the design and construction of a 24-acre public park on the Tennessee River in Knoxville. Kahler has also taught landscape architectural representation at Boston Architectural College. No stranger to Philadelphia, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and the Growth and Structure of Cities from Bryn Mawr College.

Housed in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Weitzman, The McHarg Center was founded in 2017 as an interdisciplinary platform for faculty research, teaching, and advocacy supporting the future of our planet.