Board of Directors
Antonia Adezio is the Executive Director of the Marin Art & Garden Center. She joined MAGC in 2015 after a move from New York, where she was the founding president and CEO of The Garden Conservancy, a national group that works to preserve exceptional gardens. In this capacity, she helped establish dozens of groups dedicated to saving gardens in their communities, and developed programs, community outreach, and funding to assure their future.
Antonia’s work at MAGC includes oversight of the beautiful historic grounds and buildings, and collaboration with resident groups including the Ross Valley Players, Moya Library/Ross Historical Society, Pixie Parents, and Laurel House Antiques. Under her leadership, MAGC has launched a new series of public programs in the arts, gardens, and conservation with recognized speakers, workshop leaders, and artists from throughout the Bay Area and beyondIn addition to her work at MAGC, Antonia serves on the board of directors of the California Garden & Landscape History Society and is an emeritus director of the Peckerwood Garden Conservation Foundation. She lives in Sonoma.
Vincent Buonanno has served for nineteen years as chairman and chief executive officer of Tempel Steel, a manufacturer of precision components for the electrical industry. He was formerly chief executive officer and principal owner of New England Container of Rhode Island. Mr. Buonanno graduated from Brown University in 1966, is a trustee emeritus, and served for ten years as chairman of the Brown Corporation’s Committee on Facilities and Design. He is currently a trustee of Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and a member of the Board of Governors of the RISD Museum. He serves on the Trustee’s Council of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and on the boards of the McCormick Boys and Girls Club of Chicago and the Society of Architectural Historians.
In addition, Mr. Buonanno is a governor of the John Carter Brown Library of Providence and a former chairman of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. He served on the boards of the Moses Brown School, Portsmouth Priory School, the Newberry Library of Chicago, and the American Academy in Rome. He was named a Cavalier by the Republic of Italy for cultural initiatives in New England and received the Brown Bear Award for distinguished service to Brown University. Mr. Buonanno is a collector of original editions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century illustrated books dealing with the architecture and urbanism of Renaissance and baroque Rome.
Scott Burns was the London-based managing partner of the Boston law firm Brown Rudnick's European practice for 19 years. He is currently serves as Special Counsel to the Clinton Healthcare Access Initiative.
Mr. Burns is a trustee of the Rhode Island School of Design and a member of the Board of Governors of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. He is a member of the Vollard Group of the British Museum. He is a trustee emeritus of Brown University. He has served as a trustee of many non-profits including the Royal Oak Foundation, The Rectory Society, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and the Providence Athenaeum. In addition, he has served as co-chair of the DeTocqueville Society of the United Way of Southeastern New England.
In 2001, Mr. Burns and his wife Cynthia Baker Burns were the recipients of gold-medal awards in the Royal Boroughs of Chelsea and Kensingtons’ window-box competitions.
Kenneth I. Helphand is Knight Professor of Landscape Architecture Emeritus at the University of Oregon, where he has taught courses in landscape history, theory, and design since 1974. He is a graduate of Brandeis University (1968) and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (MLA 1972). Professor Helphand has lectured at dozens of universities and is a regular visiting professor at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. He is the author of numerous articles and reviews on landscape history and theory, and has a particular interest in the contemporary American landscape. He served as editor of Landscape Journal from 1994 to 2002. Professor Helphand is the recipient of distinguished teaching awards from the University of Oregon (1993) and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (1997). He is the author of Colorado: Visions of an American Landscape (1991), Yard Street Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space (with Cynthia Girling, 1994), Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture and the Making of Modern Israel (2002), and Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime (2006). He is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, and an honorary member of the Israel Association of Landscape Architects. He is also a recipient of the Bradford Williams Medal, a Graham Foundation Grant.
Robin Karson is the founder and executive director of the Library of American Landscape History, a not-for-profit organization that produces books and exhibitions about American landscape history. She is also an associate publisher of books and the author of several volumes, including The Muses of Gwinn (1995), Fletcher Steele, Landscape Architect (2003), and A Genius for Place (2007). She served as the coeditor of Pioneers of American Landscape Design (2000). Ms. Karson frequently writes on early twentieth-century landscape design and has organized several touring exhibitions. She is currently editing a two-volume book about Warren H. Manning.
Nancy S. Newcomb served on the boards of DIRECTV and Sysco Corporations. She had a 35-year career in the financial industry at Citigroup where she had diverse executive responsibilities including worldwide treasury, risk management, and global corporate clients. She is a life trustee of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a trustee of Lyme Land Trust, chair emeritus of the New-York Historical Society, and trustee emeritus of Connecticut College. She is a graduate of Connecticut College, has a master’s degree from Boston University, and is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s Program for Management Development. She lives in New York City and Lyme, Connecticut, where she pursues her life-long love of gardening and landscape.
Laurie D. Olin, RLA, FASLA, is the founding partner of OLIN, a Philadelphia-based landscape-architecture and urban-design firm. The former chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University, he currently holds the title of practice professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught for over thirty years. Among numerous projects for which he has received wide acclaim are Bryant Park and Columbus Circle in New York City and the Brancusi Ensemble in Romania. His recent work includes Simon and Helen Director Park in Portland and the Barnes Foundation Art Education Center in Philadelphia. In addition to being a practitioner and teacher, he is the author of a didactic memoir, Across Open Fields: Essays Drawn from English Landscapes (1999), and coauthor of Olin: Placemaking (2008), which details his firm’s philosophy and practice.
Mr. Olin is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Society of Landscape Architects. He is the recipient of the 1998 Award in Architecture of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 2005 Design Medal of the American Society of Landscape Architects. In 2008 his firm received the 2008 Landscape Design Award from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum for excellence and innovation in landscape design and dedication to sustainability.
Therese O'Malley, Ph.D., is the former associate dean at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where she worked from 1984-2021. She received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. O’Malley's scholarship focuses on the history of landscape architecture and garden design from in the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, concentrating on the transatlantic exchange of plants and ideas. Her recent work includes publications on the art of natural history, the history of botanic gardens, the early professions of landscape and garden design, Beatrix Farrand, Mildred Bliss, and Frank Lloyd Wright. She curated the exhibition for the New York Botanical Garden, Glasshouses, Architecture of Light and Air (2005).
She is the former president and fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians and a member of several editorial and fellowship boards. She is an advisor to the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation and a board member for Mount Vernon Place Conservancy. She was chair of the Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art from 1994 to 2000 and a senior fellow in Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks from 1989 to 1995. Dr. O’Malley lectures internationally and has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Penn, and Temple universities. She is the director of the National Gallery of Arts digital project History of Early American Landscape Design (heald@nga.gov), which is based on her publication, Keywords in American Landscape Design (2010).
John A. Pinto is the Howard Crosby Butler Memorial Professor of the History of Architecture, Emeritus in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. His research interests center on architecture, urbanism, and landscape in Rome, especially in the eighteenth century. Among his publications are The Trevi Fountain (1986), Hadrian’s Villa and its Legacy (1995, coauthored by William L. MacDonald), Speaking Ruins (2011), and City of the Soul. He served on the Senior Fellows Committee for Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks from 1988 to 1991 and 2017 to 2021 and was a trustee of the American Academy in Rome from 1996 to 2012.
Reuben M. Rainey is William Stone Weedon Professor Emeritus in the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he taught for twenty-eight years and chaired the Department of Landscape Architecture. His courses focused on the history of landscape architecture and the design of healing environments for a wide range of health-care facilities. His academic background includes a B.A. from Duke University, a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Virginia. He taught in the religion departments at Columbia University and Middlebury College before entering the field of landscape architecture.
Dr. Rainey’s research and publications encompass topics as diverse as nineteenth- and twentieth-century park design, historic preservation, Italian Renaissance villas, and the work of twentieth-century landscape architects. He also produces documentary videos on a wide range of subjects, including Italian Renaissance villas and healing gardens. Currently he is codirector of the Center for Design and Health, based in the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. Its mission is the promotion of cross-disciplinary research in the design of patient-centered medical facilities and healthy neighborhoods and cities.
Frederic C. Rich is Of Counsel to Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York, where he was a partner for many years. He is now a writer. His latest book, Getting to Green, about environmental politics, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in April 2016. Active in many environmental organizations, Mr. Rich is a vice-chair of the Land Trust Alliance, a national land-conservation group, and a longtime director and former board chairman of Scenic Hudson, a fifty-year-old organization dedicated to land conservation and environmental quality in the Hudson River Valley. In addition to serving as the chairman of the Foundation for Landscape Studies, he serves as vice-chair of the board of directors of the Battery Conservancy, which is spearheading the restoration and revitalization of Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, and a director of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival.
Mr. Rich is an amateur gardener and musician. He has designed a large garden in Garrison, New York, and composed The Hudson Oratorio, which premiered in 1996 and was subsequently recorded. He received an A.B. from Princeton University and a J.D. from University of Virginia School of Law, and studied moral philosophy as a Keasbey Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge.
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is the founding president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. A native of San Antonio, Texas, she earned a B.A. degree from Wellesley College and an M.A. in city planning from Yale University. In 1979, she was appointed Central Park administrator. The following year, in order to bring citizen support to the restoration and management renewal of Central Park, she initiated the Central Park Conservancy, the nation’s first public-private park partnership.
Rogers led the Conservancy as president until 1996, when she founded the Cityscape Institute. In 2002, she created the Garden History and Landscape Studies curriculum at the Bard Graduate Center, and in 2005 she established the Foundation for Landscape Studies, whose mission is to promote an active understanding of the meaning of place in human life through support of landscape-history scholarship, publication of the journal Site/Lines, and collaboration with other organizations and institutions on landscape-related projects. As the owner with her husband, Theodore C. Rogers, of the C. L. Browning Ranch in the Texas Hill Country, she oversees the enhancement of its natural beauty, ecological health, and educational value.
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 (1971), Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York (1972), Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration Plan (1987), Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (2001), Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design (2010), Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries (2011), Learning Las Vegas: Portrait of a Northern New Mexican Place (2013), Green Metropolis: The Extraordinary Landscape of New York City as Nature, History, and Landscape Design, and Writing the City: Essays on New York (2022). In addition, she is the coauthor with Jason Epstein of East Hampton: A History and Guide (1975).
Rogers is a life trustee of the Central Park Conservancy and member of the boards of The Battery Conservancy and the Library of American Landscape History. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the advisory board of the National Association of Olmsted Parks and The Olana Partnership. She is an honorary member of the American Society of Landscape Architects and a recipient of the society’s 2005 LaGasse Medal. In 2010 she received the Green-Wood Historic Fund’s Dewitt Clinton Award in Arts, Literature, Preservation, and Historic Research and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Jane Jacobs Medal for lifetime achievement. In 2012 she was honored with the Henry Hope Reed Award from the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, and in 2013 the Preservation League of New York State bestowed on her its Pillar of New York Award. In 2016 she received the New York Botanical Garden’s rarely conferred Gold Medal.
Margaret D. Sullivan holds a B.A. in philosophy and English literature from Hunter College and an M.A. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. A freelance writer and editor, she taught for twenty years as an adjunct lecturer in the Department of English at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Ms. Sullivan is a former chair of the New York Committee of the Garden Club of America and remains an active member of the committee. She currently serves on the GCA House Committee. She is a past president of the Southampton Garden Club and currently honorary member at large and advisor to the executive committee. She is a trustee of the Bowne House Historical Society. Additional affiliations include the Women’s Committee of the Central Park Conservancy, Friends of the Horticultural Society of New York, Committee of the New York Botanical Garden, the New York Unit of the Herb Society of America, and the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons. Ms. Sullivan lives in New York City and Southampton, New York.