Throughout her 30-year career as a Landscape Architect, Brenda Williams has focused her passion and empathy for understanding human connections to landscapes, developing methods to support, strengthen, and adapt significant landscapes for the people to whom they are meaningful. Her work has a strong emphasis on landscapes in the public realm, where she champions appropriate access, recognition, preservation, adaptation, and interpretation of culturally significant sites. Recognized as a national leader in the conservation of cultural landscapes, she has developed award-winning design, planning, and stewardship solutions for significant cultural landscapes at National Parks, National Historic Landmarks, and sites of regional and local importance throughout the United States. 

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Her impact reaches beyond the national and globally significant cultural project sites within her portfolio. She has advanced professional practice by championing inclusion within process and diversity in solutions; widening the landscape architect’s role in community engagement processes to extend the relevance, excellence, and vitality of the profession. Her approach begins with embracing the essence of cultural landscapes as places that are important because of their connections to the people who have created and used them in the past, those who use them today, and others who will experience them in the future.

To integrate the complexity and diversity of perspectives and guidance of associated people into the planning and design process, she leads each project as a collective learning experience. In workshops, presentations, and reports, she has taught the public, design professionals, interpreters, and site caretakers to “read” historic landscapes through understanding historic context and patterns. By seeking guidance from, and earnestly respecting, culturally connected people, she guides them into the planning process as collaborators. Brenda is especially adept at bringing together diverse stakeholders to collaborate on planning and design challenges arriving at innovative, community-driven solutions for works that are authentic, accessible, inspiring, and sustainable.

WI ASLA is proud to have Brenda as part of the Wisconsin landscape architecture family and congratulate her as the 2020 WI ASLA Life Achievement Award.