Faculty news

In this online lecture, O’Shea will discuss recent projects by his practice, Hinterlands, that exemplify the firm’s commitment to radically rethinking the contemporary urban realm through the medium of landscape.

Led by Prof. Mary Pat McGuire, the initiative is part of a growing movement to transform underused paved areas, such as empty parking lots, into vibrant, green, community spaces.

Three members of our department community—faculty member Kelley Lemon, current student Ana Valderrama, and alum Sonal Mithal—have been awarded prestigious grants from the Graham Foundation.

Prof. Kelley Lemon and PhD in Landscape Architecture alumnus Dongying Li are two of the twelve faculty Research Fellows selected to study high-performing landscape projects in the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s 2022 Case Study Investigation program.

We are thrilled to announce that our colleague Prof. Aneesha Dharwadker, who holds a joint appointment in the Illinois School of Architecture and our Department of Landscape Architecture, has been awarded a 2022 New Faculty Teaching Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the American Institute of Architecture Students!

This evening, Prof. Beronda L. Montgomery delivered the second annual Terry Harkness "Plants in Design" Lecture in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois.

On August 23, University of Illinois President Tim Killeen awarded the Presidential Medallion to our colleague Prof. Bill Sullivan and 27 other key leaders of the university system’s COVID-19 response effort.

LA+CREATURE—the third in the LA+ international design ideas competition series—asked how we can use design to open our cities, our landscapes, and our minds to a more symbiotic existence with other creatures.

We are pleased to announce that Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar al-Durr (Oxford University Press, 2020) by Prof. Dede Ruggles, Debra L. Mitchell Chair in Landscape Architecture, has won the Nancy Lapp Book Award from the American Schools of Oriental Research.

The Department of Landscape Architecture is pleased to announce that Kelley Lemon will be joining our faculty as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, to begin in August 2021.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. David Hays has been appointed the Brenton H. and Jean B. Wadsworth Head of the Department of Landscape Architecture.

Congratulations to Prof. Dede Ruggles, whose essay “Listening to Islamic Gardens and Landscapes,” published in the book Music, Sound, and Architecture in Islam (2017), has been awarded a 2020 Essay Prize by the Landscape History Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Congratulations to our faculty members, instructors, and teaching assistants included on the Fall 2019 List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, which was recently posted by the University’s Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning.

We are very pleased to announce that Jie Hu—Director and Chief Designer of the Research Center for Landscape Architecture at the Beijing Tsinghua Tongheng Urban Planning and Design Institute (THUPDI) and Vice-President of THUPDI overall—will be joining our faculty beginning this August 2020 to chair our new Master of Sustainable Urban Design program.

Prof. Dede Ruggles appears in “The Ornament of the World,” a documentary film that premiered at the Madrid International Film Festival this past summer and will air on PBS on December 17.

“Crossing the Skyline,” an exhibition on architecture, literacy, and incarceration curated by Prof. Aneehsa Dharwadker, has opened in the Sullivan Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Congratulations to Prof. Mary Pat McGuire, Jessica M. Henson, and 21 distinguished contributors on the release of Fresh Water: Design Research for Inland Water Territories.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Pollyanna Rhee will be joining our department as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture with a focus on landscape history.

Congratulations to our Department Head, Bill Sullivan, who was inducted into the Academy of Fellows of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture!