Yesterday, the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) announced the names of the two National Olmsted Scholars and six Finalists for the 2014 Olmsted Scholars Program, a national awards program that supports exceptional landscape architecture student leaders. Sara Zewde, a Harvard Graduate School of Design master’s student, was selected as the 2014 National Olmsted Scholar and will receive the $25,000 graduate prize. Louisiana State University student Erin Percevault will be awarded the $15,000 undergraduate National Olmsted Scholar award. The winners were announced two days before Olmsted’s birthday, Friday, April 25.
Named after Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture, LAF’s Olmsted Scholars program has annually honored exceptional student leaders of landscape architecture for the past seven years. Each year, accredited landscape architecture universities across the United States and Canada are invited to nominate one undergraduate and one graduate student to the program. This year, two independent juries made up of leaders in the landscape architecture profession selected the two winners and six finalists from a group of 45 graduate and 30 undergraduate students.
This year’s graduate National Olmsted Scholar, Sara Zewde, plans to use her $25,000 prize to help design culturally and ecologically relevant urban landscapes in the Pequena África and Treme communities of Rio de Janiero, Brazil and New Orleans, Louisiana. She holds a Master of City Planning from MIT and a B.A. from Boston University. She expects to receive her Master of Landscape Architecture in May 2015.
Louisiana State University student Erin Percevault will use her $15,000 undergraduate award to study how to minimize the environmental degradation caused by thorium extraction in Lemhi Pass, a mountain route in the Beaverhead Mountains that lies on the Montana-Idaho border. She expects to graduate May 2015 with a Bachelor in Landscape Architecture.
The six selected National Scholar Finalists will also receive a $1,000 award each. The graduate finalists are:
- VeraEve Giampietro, University of Washington
- Harriett Jameson, University of Virginia
- Anneliza Kaufer, University of Pennsylvania
The undergraduate finalists are:
- Viviana Castro, University of Florida
- Clemente Rico, Arizona State University
- Blythe Worstell, Ohio State University
All 75 Olmsted Scholars will be honored at LAF’s annual benefit during this year’s ASLA conference in Denver, Colorado. These scholars join a community of over 300 past and present Olmsted Scholars.
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