Gwendolyn Cohen

Master of Landscape Architecture, University of Virginia, 2014
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, 2005

Gwendolyn Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, where she teaches landscape architecture design studios, courses in the Construction Sequence and elective seminars. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a Master in Landscape Architecture and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design. Gwen has practiced landscape architecture as an associate at Studio Outside Landscape Architecture in Dallas, Texas and as a landscape designer at Spackman, Mossop, Michaels in New Orleans, Louisiana. Gwen lead master planning projects for the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, Fort Worth Botanic Garden, and Marsh Botanical Garden. Her built work ranges in scale and includes the design of twenty-three Dallas Public School campuses that now serve as public parks, a corporate campus in Columbus, Ohio, and innovative residential developments such as PS1200 in Fort Worth (in collaboration with D.I.R.T. Studio) and Saint Thomas / Ninth in New Orleans. While practicing, she co-taught studios at the University of Texas in Arlington and the University of Texas in Austin. She served as an artist-in-residence at the University of Oregon’s Overlook Field School. In collaboration with Isaac Cohen, she has researched the Blackland Prairie of Texas—its expansive vertisol soils, its ecologies, its cycles of disturbance, and people’s relationship to it. The Black Belt of Alabama is also defined by its vertisol soils, and shares similar cultural histories. These two ecoregions share a geologic history and reveal the connection between the ground and lived experiences of place.

Interest areas in research and practice:
Gwendolyn Cohen is a landscape designer whose work considers kinship to the ground, the stories of prairie landscapes, and ways of reading the landscape. Each of these threads are deeply concerned with place, perception, (joyful whimsy), and materiality.