Julie Bargmann has won the inaugural Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. The Oberlander Prize is an initiative of The Cultural Landscape Foundation and includes a $100,000 award and two years of public engagement activities focused on the laureate and landscape architecture.

Bargmann, a native of Westwood, NJ, is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA, and the founder of D.I.R.T. (“Dump It Right There”) studio. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master in Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (1987). In 1989-90 she was a Fellow in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome.

The Oberlander Prize Jury met virtually in June, July and August 2021 to select the inaugural laureate, due to the global novel coronavirus pandemic and the necessity for social distancing. According to Dorothée Imbert, Chair of the seven-person international Oberlander Prize Jury, qualities that made Bargmann stand out include: “her leadership in the world of ideas, her impact on the public landscape, her model of an activist practice, and her commitment to advancing landscape architecture both through teaching and design.” As Bargmann has said of herself: “The two ends of my barbell are designer-artist and political animal.”

Read the full press release at the  The Cultural Landscape Foundation