Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

 
For almost three decades, Anita Berrizbeitia has been a long-time leader in academia and the profession through her copious and rigorous research, graduate-level teaching, extensive publishing, and persistent advocacy for landscape architecture. Her childhood in Caracas, Venezuela informed her approach to offering cross-cultural and interdisciplinary frameworks to understanding landscape architecture. Much of her research explores nineteenth- and twentieth-century public realm landscapes, with interests in material culture, urban political ecology, and the productive functions of landscapes in processes of urbanization and climate adaptation in North American/European and Latin American contexts. A prolific scholar, Berrizbeitia's many books, chapters, and essays are standard texts within landscape architecture and architecture curricula. Her research and publications have earned her wide recognition and awards nationally and internationally, including the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in 2006. As chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, she worked to diversity the faculty and student body and to broaden the curriculum to better reflect current environmental and societal challenges, including the addition of a required course in climate change called "Climate by Design." Through her bold intellectual leadership, Berrizbeitia innovated a range of new design studios that produced novel synergies across multiple design disciplines and were in high demand. Her creativity, compassion, and commitment as a scholar and landscape visionary have left an indelible mark on the academy and the profession.