The Larger Landscape Conversation: Monumental Moves

Jha D. Amazi is a Principal at MASS Design Group and leads the Public Memory and Memorials Lab, engaging communities to design projects such as the Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument Project (Chicago, IL), the Gun Violence Memorial Project (multiple locations), and the Sugar Land 95 Cemetery Memorial Project (Sugar Land, TX). In 2023, she was appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Council on Black Empowerment by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. Jha D graduated with honors from Northeastern University (BS Architecture) and the University of Pennsylvania (Master of. Architecture I). Prior to joining MASS, she worked as a Designer at Sasaki and taught studio at the Boston Architectural College.

Signe Nielsen has been a practicing landscape architect and urban designer in New York since 1978 and is currently at Signe Nielsen, NYC Design Commission + Mathews Nielsen in New York. Her body of work has renewed environmental integrity and transformed the quality of spaces for those who live, work, and play in the urban realm. A Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, she is the recipient of over 100 national and local design awards for public open space projects and is published extensively in national and international publications. Nielsen is a Professor of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture at Pratt Institute in both the Graduate and Undergraduate Schools of Architecture and is the former President for the Public Design Commission of the City of New York. Born in Paris, Nielsen holds degrees in Urban Planning from Smith College; in Landscape Architecture from City College of New York; and in Construction Management from Pratt Institute.

Sue Mobley is the Director of Research at Monument Lab. She was most recently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Art and Space at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, as well as a member of the New Orleans City Planning Commission. Sue was Co-Director of the Panel of Experts for the New Orleans City Council Confederate Streets Renaming Commission and Co-Director of Paper Monuments, a public art and public history project that invited residents to imagine new monuments for New Orleans. She served as the inaugural Visiting Fellow for Arts and Culture at the American Planning Association and was formerly Public Programs Manager at the Small Center for Collaborative Design at Tulane School of Architecture. She is the author of Human Rights, Human Wrongs, Observation of Human Rights Law and Norms in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, a contributor to Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity, a contributor to Teachable Monuments: Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue and Confront Controversies, and a contributor to Empty Pedestals. Sue holds a BA in Anthropology from Loyola University New Orleans and an MA in Political Science from the American University in Cairo.

Follow Sue on X @wingedisis. 

Charles Waldheim is an American Canadian architect and urbanist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waldheim’s research examines the relationships between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. Waldheim is author, editor, or co-editor of numerous publications on these topics, including Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory and The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Waldheim developed the theory of landscape urbanism in response to the industrial economies and emergent ecologies of the American city. On this topic, he curates Harvard GSD’s Future of the American City platform.

Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he directs the school’s Office for Urbanization. He also serves as Ruettgers Curator of Landscape at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston where he convenes The Larger (Landscape) Conversation. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan, and the Cullinan Chair at Rice University. He has been visiting scholar at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany.