My career in environmental design began with a vegetable garden that grew enough zucchini to feed the neighborhood and long hours spent among the barrel cactus and trapdoor spiders that lived on the hillside behind my childhood home in San Diego. I completed studies in landscape architecture at Cal Poly SLO and established my own practice in 1990. Studio work has focused on sustainable approaches to design, including projects for adaptation strategies for sea level rise, community-based design, affordable housing, habitat gardens, and local food production at a range of scales.

As a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (1994-95), I explored the health and healing aspects of cloisters. Research conducted for three cloisters in a 19th century Roman hospital complex that encompassed 10th century and 15th century monasteries, received a Visionary Landscapes award from Landscape Architecture magazine. A year in the Visual Arts MFA program at UCSD in La Jolla introduced me to the work of the pioneering eco-artists Helen and Newton Harrison. This has resulted in a long-lasting engagement with the Harrisons and a continuing preoccupation with the intersections and overlaps of art and ecology. I was the co-founder of hybrid, an art gallery that examined the boundaries between art and design. The Mayor of San Diego appointed me as Public Artist to the City of San Diego’s Community Forest Advisory Board from 1999-2004. I am currently on the Board of Art Produce, a non-profit organization dedicated to building community through the arts, and the Design Council of EarthLab, a climate action park in Southeast San Diego.

After completing a graduate degree from Yale University’s School of Architecture (2006), my practice expanded to include research and teaching, both in California and Oregon. I was a visiting professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon 2006-08 and 2013-17, and founding chair of a new landscape architecture program at the NewSchool of Architecture + Design in San Diego 2009-12. My writings on relationships between art and land use practices have been published in Places journal and the Journal of Environmental Philosophy.