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Rosetta Elkin named one of American Academy in Rome’s 2017–2018 Rome Prize winners

Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Rosetta S. Elkin has been named one of the American Academy in Rome’s (AAR) 2017–2018 Rome Prize winners, joining 32 other artists and scholars that “represent some of the most talented minds in the United States and Italy,” writes AAR.

Elkin has been awarded the AAR’s Garden Club of America Rome Prize for project Shorelines: The Case of Italian Stone Pine.

Elkin is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the GSD and an Associate at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Her teaching and research focus on an expanded consideration of plant life. As co-director of the Master in Design Studies concentration in Risk and Resilience, her work exposes the biological complexity of global greening projects, implicit in recovery, retreat and preemptive environmental programs.

The AAR has awarded the Rome Prize for over a century in 11 broad disciplines, including musical composition, visual arts, literature, architecture, and landscape architecture, for which Elkin won her prize. AAR writes that it awards the Rome Prize to “uniquely creative individuals,” by independent juries through a national competition process. Recipients are invited to Rome and “provided with the time and space to think and pursue their individual work as part of a dynamic international community,” AAR continues.

At the GSD, Elkin teaches in the core studio sequence and leads seminars in fieldwork and planting design. She was previously the Daniel Urban Kiley Fellow at GSD in 2012-13 and also served as faculty editor for Platform 6. Her forthcoming publication, Tiny Taxonomy (Actar 2017), deliberates on the scale of gardening in practice, by indexing three built projects.

Learn more about the Rome Prize and see other 2017–2018 Rome Prize winners on the AAR’s website.