Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
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.