Claudia Sackett Hennum is a landscape designer with a background in art and horticulture. She received her MLA from the University of Washington in 2021 and previously received her BFA from Tufts University and the Museum School.
Before pursuing her MLA, Claudia worked as a farmer, gardener, landscaper, and floral designer. She is interested in the ways that plants are both culturally and ecologically situated, how places change and evolve over time, and the many types of labor that go into creating and maintaining planted spaces.
In the past, through work with garden volunteers and apprentices, Claudia has enjoyed introducing people to the plant world, as well as facilitating independent exploration and skill development.
As a landscape architect, Steph appreciates that every project presents an opportunity to connect people to nature and to each other. She finds delight in the design process; in distilling the essence of a place in a way that responds to and resonates with the site. She enjoys crafting details and seeing built projects evolve over time.
Focused primarily on urban placemaking and park design, she enjoys working on a variety of project types and scales, as well as collaborating with designers and clients who bring positive change and strive to blend beauty, function, and renewal through design. Most of her projects have been within the greater Puget Sound’s public realm, navigating its complex agencies, for its diverse communities and with respect for its dynamic ecologies.
Steph holds a Bachelor of Science in Forestry and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, where she also taught several design studios and drawing classes. She grew up splitting her time between Buenos Aires and Los Angeles, but is happy to have found a home in the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys spending as much time as possible outdoors, backpacking, hiking or cycling.
Tim is passionate about empowering communities through design. Through this empowerment Tim looks to deconstruct past and current design and processes that contribute to the marginalization of communities of color. For the past ten years Tim has worked with Indigenous communities and communities of color, helping them reclaim their communities through the process of design.
Tim received a Master’s in Landscape Architecture and a Master’s in Urban Design and Planning in 2016 and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Geography, all from the University of Washington. He currently is a Lecturer, reviewer, researcher and mentor for the University of Landscape Architecture Program.
Tim loves to travel. While at home in Seattle he likes to be with friends and family in any setting. You can find him out in a park or at a local brewery.
Keith Harris is a Full Time Lecturer-Temporary in the Department of Urban Design & Planning. Keith currently teaches in our undergraduate program, Community Environment and Planning and in our online Master of Infrastructure Planning & Management program. He also teaches in the Landscape Architecture department, and the Urban Studies program at University of Washington Tacoma.
“My research hovers around critical urban theory and investigates the political, economic, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of the urbanization process. An erstwhile civil engineer, I tend to write on complex and contradictory landscapes and infrastructure, such as South Lake Union, the Elliott Bay Seawall, and the Los Angeles River, but I also write about grassroots urban politics in our region and translate critical theory and fiction that relates to the built environment from French and Spanish into English. This range of research corresponds, in part, to my wide variety of teaching experiences over the last decade in all of the CBE departments (except real estate), in the School of Urban Studies at UW-Tacoma, and especially in the Comparative History of Ideas (CHID) department on our campus.”
Rebecca’s long-term design and research interests involve exploring a gap between built environment design fields and public health research. She believes that an essential component of design activism must be research that can inform equitable policy. Rebecca holds a Master of Landscape Architecture and Graduate Certificate of Global Health from the University of Washington, and is a current NIH Fogarty Scholar. She has spent recent years working with the design-action-research firm Traction on design and research projects that examine built environments as social determinants of human and ecological health in marginalized urban communities in Peru. In addition to English, Rebecca speaks Spanish and Portuguese, and has a blended background in international relations, journalism, and horticulture—all of which is integral to her current interdisciplinary work.
Kameron Selby is a licensed architect currently practicing in Seattle, Washington. Being born and raised in Western Washington and earning his BSD in Architecture at Arizona State University allowed Kameron to experience a dichotomy of environments; one being a constant rainstorm and the other a drought. These experiences helped him to better understand the importance of climate and site-responsive design. Upon returning to the Pacific Northwest Kameron attended the University of Washington, receiving both a Masters Degree in Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Drawing on his education in both fields Kameron strives to better understand the liminal space that occurs between the built and natural environments and where those thresholds can begin to fade away. He currently serves as a studio instructor and part-time lecturer in both the architecture and landscape architecture departments. When not working, Kameron enjoys traveling, photography, spending time with family and friends, and exploring the diverse environments that the Pacific Northwest has to offer.
Jorge ‘Coco’ Alarcon is a Peruvian architect and landscape architect currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Global Health in Implementation Science at the University of Washington. He is a former National Institutes of Health Fogarty and Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted scholar. Since 2009 his work on design and research in Peru has focused on how the built environment impacts human and ecological health. His most recent project examines how landscape architectural community-based interventions in the cities of the Amazon rainforest impact different dimensions of health and ecology, including dengue and other infectious diseases, mental and social health, nutrition, biodiversity, and abundance of local species.
A habitual researcher and avid seeker of stories, Jean Ni engages with the world through open-ended interdisciplinary inquiry. Her values are deeply rooted in practices that are attentive to care, accountability, and the cultivation of respectful relations with all fellow beings.
By integrating landscape experience, feminist inquiry, and speculative fiction, Jean aims to craft theoretical apparatuses through which to investigate art and design responses that reject violent structures built by those who believe they are in power. She is interested in the transformative potential of design fictions, and how these demonstrate the political and ethical implications of design thinking. Her work grapples with questions of ontology, meaning-making, and identity formation in space.
Jean’s design work has centered social justice through seeking pathways to meaningfully engage communities and facilitating spatial equity initiatives. Her collaborations incorporate conscientious analysis, concept development, and empathetic processes of understanding and honoring community values from early engagement through place design.
Jean received a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Washington in 2018 and BA in International Studies/Sociology from University of California at San Diego. She currently serves as a studio reviewer, lecturer, and mentor in the UW department of Landscape Architecture.
In her own time, Jean finds joy in exploring feminist science fiction, political ecology, conceptual art, bicycle touring, and rocks.
J. Renée Major graduated from Design and Architecture Senior High (DASH) in 2008 and went on to pursue sustainability and landscape architecture degrees at the University of Florida and Louisiana State University, respectively. J. Renée then moved to Seattle and has practiced at interdisciplinary design and planning firms across a number of scales. In 2020, in response to the renewed social justice uprising and economic shifts in response to the pandemic she founded her own consultancy, Well Outside. Her practice, research and passions dive into equity issues, environmentalism, public involvement strategy, and education. She thinks about how all of these things interact in the public realm and built environments.
J. Renée has been on several Seattle commissions and committees and now serves most prominently on the Shape Our Water Design Team, Seattle’s Public Art Advisory committee, the Board of Directors for Sawhorse Revolution and the steering committee for the Trust for Public Land’s Next Gen Council. She is often a lecturer and guest critic when she isn’t working with her own students, volunteers or clients.
Outside of civic and Well Outside work J. Renee has joined Gensler’s Seattle office working on a strategy, change management and innovation project load. J. Renée has, and hopes to continue, publishing written and mixed-media works exploring inclusion, advocacy and resilience in design activism, products and spaces and guiding students in their quest for similar.