LALH Directors

Keith N. Morgan, FSAH, LALH president, is professor emeritus of architectural history and American & New England Studies at Boston University, where he served as director of Preservation Studies, director of American and New England Studies, and chair of the History of Art and Architecture Department for two terms. He is a former national president of the Society of Architectural Historians. His publications include American Victorian Architecture (as coauthor); Charles A. Platt, The Artist as Architect; Boston Architecture, 1975-1990 (as coauthor); Shaping an American Landscape: The Art and Architecture of Charles A. Platt; the introduction to the reprint edition of Italian Gardens by Charles A. Platt; the introduction to the LALH reprint edition of Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect; and Community by Design (as coauthor), which was awarded the Ruth Emery Prize of the Victorian Society in America. He was the architecture editor for The Encyclopedia of New England and edited Buildings of Massachusetts: Metropolitan Boston, a volume in the Buildings of the United States series organized by the Society of Architectural Historians.  In addition to his duties as a member of the board and executive committee of LALH, he has served as board and committee member for various scholarly and cultural, regional and national organizations.  

Ethan Carr, FASLA, LALH vice president, is a nationally recognized landscape historian and preservationist specializing in the public landscape of the United States. He has helped redefine the scholarship on American national parks and modern landscape design through his books Wilderness by Design, which won an American Society of Landscape Architects honor award, and Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma, which received the Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award from the Society of Architectural Historians and the J. B. Jackson Award from the Foundation for Landscape Studies. He is editor of the LALH series Designing the American Park; author of The Greatest Beach: A History of Cape Cod National Seashore and Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City; coauthor, with Rolf Diamant, of Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea; and coeditor of Volume 8 of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted.

Mark Zelonis, Hon. ASLA, LALH treasurer, is president of Cultural Excursions, where he leads tours of gardens, landscapes, and other cultural sites. He is retired Ruth Lily Deputy Director of Environmental and Historic Preservation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where he oversaw the landscapes of the 152-acre museum complex: Oldfields, a 26-acre American Country Place estate; the IMA’s main campus; and the 100-acre Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park. Zelonis also managed the Dan Kiley-designed landscape of the J. Irwin Miller House and Garden, a National Historic Landmark. Previously, Zelonis served as executive director of the Heritage Trust of Rhode Island; as executive director at Blithewold Mansion & Gardens in Bristol, Rhode Island; and as director of Fuller Gardens, North Hampton, New Hampshire.

Zelonis earned a BS at the University of New Hampshire, an MS in the Longwood Program in Public Horticulture Administration, and a museum studies certificate at the University of Delaware. He also studied in the Program for the Protection and Conservation of Historic Landscapes, Parks and Gardens, at West Dean College in Chichester, England. He serves on the Indiana Landmarks’ Cultural Landscape Committee and is an honorary member of the Horticultural Club of Boston and the Indianapolis Garden Club.

Barbara Shear, LALH clerk, served for many years as research manager for the New York Philharmonic in New York City. She is now an independent development consultant whose clients include arts, education, and social service organizations. Shear earned a bachelor’s degree at Barnard College, with a major in American studies, concentrating on American cultural history. After receiving a master’s degree in cinema studies, she worked as a researcher on several books and documentaries, including a history of women in cinema; as a cataloguer for a wide-ranging movie collection; and as a copywriter for Time-Life Films. She subsequently moved into the field of marketing-research, providing market analysis and strategic planning guidance to both corporate and not-for-profit clients. She is a member of an alumnae committee which has gathered oral histories and produced films about Barnard College classmates.

Shannon Hackett earned a BS from the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas and was a doctoral candidate in medieval French literature at Northwestern University. She studied horticulture and landscape design at the Professional School of the Chicago Botanic Garden, where she served on the Design Symposium Advisory Committee. A landscape designer and president of Fine Gardens, LLC, she focuses on ecological residential design and historic garden restoration.  Her projects include the restoration of the Jens Jensen-designed Florsheim estate in Highland Park, Illinois. She is a member of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers, MetroHort (New York City), the Midwest Ecological Landscape Design Association, and the Landscape Design Association, of which she is a past president.

Darrel Morrison, FASLA, a longtime advocate of the use of native vegetation and native plant communities as a basis for landscape design, has been teaching and practicing ecologically based design and management since the 1970s. He received his MS in landscape architecture from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and taught there from 1969 to 1983. He then went to the College of Environmental Design at the University of Georgia, where he was dean until 1992. After retiring from UGA in 2004, he moved to Manhattan, where he taught in the master’s program in landscape design at Columbia University. Morrison recently returned to Madison and continues to practice ecologically based design. His current and recent work includes projects at Storm King Art Center, the New York Botanical Garden, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Previously, Morrison was the senior landscape designer for the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas, and he designed the four-acre native plant garden at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison. He was twice awarded the Outstanding Educator Award by the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, and he has received the American Horticultural Society’s Teaching Award, as well as its Landscape Design Award. He is the author of Beauty of the Wild: A Life Designing Landscapes Inspired by Nature.

Daniel J. Nadenicek, FASLA, is former dean of the University of Georgia College of Environment and current Design and Constance Knowles Draper Chair in Environmental Design. A widely published scholar in the areas of historic preservation, landscape history, and urban design, Nadenicek previously served as chair of the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at Clemson University and director of Healthy Communities and Historic Preservation at Clemson’s Restoration Institute. He joined the faculty of Clemson in 2002 after working eleven years at Pennsylvania State University, where he was on the landscape architecture faculty and director of the Center for Studies in Landscape History.

His publications include more than ninety articles, reviews, reports, and proceedings. Nadenicek also has presented more than seventy-five lectures, papers, and panel presentations in North America and Europe and has helped organize several major national and international conferences and symposia. He is currently writing a book about the conservation work of nineteenth-century American businessman Frederick Billings. He edits the LALH series Critical Studies in the History of Environmental Design and serves on the editorial boards of Landscape Journal and the University of Georgia Press. He is a past president of the Sigma Lambda Alpha honor society and a former member of the Executive Council of the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation. He has been a consultant on historic forests for the National Park Service and helped design the Campus Peace Garden at Penn State. Nadenicek earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history at Mankato State University and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota.

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Hon. ASLA, is the founding president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. A native of San Antonio, Texas, she earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from Wellesley College and a master’s degree in city planning from Yale University. Since 1964, she has resided in New York City. In 1979, Rogers became the first person to hold the title of Central Park Administrator, and she was the founding president of the Central Park Conservancy, the public–private partnership created in 1980 to bring citizen support to the restoration and renewed management of Central Park. She served in both positions until 1996.

A writer on the history of landscape design and the cultural meaning of place, Rogers is the author of The Forests and Wetlands of New York City; Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York; The Central Park Book; Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration Plan; Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History; Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design (as coauthor); Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries, a 2012 American Horticultural Society Book Award winner; Learning Las Vegas: Portrait of a Northern New Mexican Place; Green Metropolis: The Extraordinary Landscapes of New York City; and Saving Central Park: A History and a Memoir.

Rogers is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of several awards for her work as a writer and landscape preservationist. These include the John Burroughs Medal for The Forests and Wetlands of New York City, which was also nominated for a National Book Award; the Wellesley College Distinguished Alumna Award; an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Miami University; the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2001 Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts; and the American Society of Landscape Architects 2005 LaGasse Medal. In 2010, she received the Green-Wood Historic Fund’s Dewitt Clinton Award in Arts, Literature, Preservation, and Historic Research. In addition, she is the winner of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2010 Jane Jacobs Medal for lifetime achievement and was named the 2012 Henry Hope Reed Award laureate by the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture.

Natalie W. Shivers, AIA, is an architect, architectural historian, author, and editor who works as associate university architect at Princeton University, where she directs planning for the campus. A graduate of Yale University, Shivers earned her master’s degree in architecture from Princeton in 1984.

Most recently she was director of campus capital planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she oversaw the development of strategic master plans and coordinated their implementation in the design and construction of new buildings and renovation projects on the historic 419-acre campus. She has also served as project architect for two firms in Los Angeles; supervisor of design, construction, and rehabilitation projects at Paramount Pictures, the Turner Entertainment Group, and 20th Century Fox; and architect/project director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C. She is coauthor of L.A.’s Early Moderns: Art, Architecture, Photography.

Marybeth Sollins is a freelance writer and editor specializing in contemporary art, art history, Russian history, and natural history. She also provides pro bono editorial services to nonprofit organizations and publishers of scholarly books. In that capacity, since 2001, she has developed and edited six companion volumes to the Emmy-nominated, Peabody Award-winning PBS television series, Art:21—Art in the Twenty-first Century; was the editor of two volumes of regional field guides to the birds of Brazil published under the auspices of the Wildlife Conservation Society; and has developed and brought to publication a number of books on Russian art history and related subjects. Sollins graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a BA in anthropology and literature, earned an MA in medieval English literature from Fordham University, and was a doctoral candidate at Fordham in medieval English dialects and literature.

She is an active participant in the field of bird conservation, is a former member of the board of the American Bird Conservancy, and has supported and participated in environmental education and place-based learning for elementary and middle-school students for many years. She also collaborates with Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology to create research and fellowship opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in the field of ornithology.

Sollins is a trustee emeritus of the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust (EBMF). EBMF supports the legacy of the twentieth-century American composer Earle Brown, fosters the composition and performance of contemporary music, and develops and presents TIME:SPANS, an annual festival of contemporary music that takes place each August in New York.

Michael Jefcoat, formerly president of Jefcoat Enterprises in Laurel, Mississippi, graduated from the University of the South. He is a gardener and a collector of books, art, and decorative art. Jefcoat is also devoted to the work of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner and serves as a trustee of the Eudora Welty Foundation. He and his wife, Evelyn, have worked assiduously in support of the restoration of the Welty house and garden in Jackson, Mississippi, and the restoration of the gardens and grounds of Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Mississippi. Among Jefcoat’s other philanthropic concerns are establishing forestry scholarships and promoting publishing in the field of American landscape history.

Susan L. Klaus is an independent historian. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, she earned master’s degrees from Harvard University Graduate School of Education and the Department of American Studies of George Washington University, where she trained as an urban historian. Her interests in the development of Washington, D.C., and in planning history led her to explore aspects of the career of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Klaus has published numerous articles on Olmsted Jr. and the work of the Olmsted firm. She is author of the LALH award-winning book A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and the Plan for Forest Hills Gardens and a coauthor of A Part of Us Forever: A Centennial History of St. Catherine’s School. A former member of the board and the board of advisors of the National Association of Olmsted Parks, Klaus also has served on the board of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.

John Franklin Miller, past LALH president and vice president, served as president of the Edsel & Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan, from 1995 until his retirement in 2007. Miller received a BA from St. John’s College in Annapolis before earning bachelor and master of divinity degrees from Yale University Divinity School. He went on to do postgraduate work in art and architectural history at the University of Maryland and attended the Williamsburg Seminar for Historical Administrators and the Attingham (England) Summer School on Historic Houses of Britain.

Miller began his career in historic preservation at Hampton National Historic Site in Baltimore, Maryland, and served as chief executive officer at Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens in Akron, Ohio, for more than fifteen years. Under his tenure, he oversaw the rehabilitation of the Warren H. Manning landscape and restoration of the English Garden designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman. At Ford House, Miller completed substantial architectural restoration and implemented several initiatives intended to interpret more fully Jens Jensen’s designed landscape.

Nancy R. Turner was the founding president of LALH. After earning a BA at Smith College, Turner worked as a community volunteer in Rochester, New York, for fifty years before moving to New York City in 2004. She was a past board member and vice president of the Garden Club of America and an emerita member of several Rochester cultural organizations including George Eastman House Museum, Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester, Genesee Country Village and Museum, Hochstein Music School, and Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra.

While living in Pittsford, New York, Turner and her late husband, Richard L. Turner, restored their c. 1840 Greek Revival house and worked with landscape architect Fletcher Steele to design a garden surrounding it, the last garden of Steele’s career. With her four children, Turner founded the Viburnum Foundation to fund programs relating to historic preservation and literacy.