Congratulations to our 2020 scholarship winners!
This year, LAF will award over $100,000 to students through 13 different scholarships and fellowships. These awards are made possible through funds established by our generous sponsors.
Juries are still convening, but the winners of 7 scholarships have been decided thus far. Scroll through to see bios and photos of these deserving students. We will post more scholarship winners as they are announced.
2020 Scholarship Application Process Timeline
Nov 2019 - Call for applications announced
Feb 1, 2020 - Application deadline for all scholarships
Feb-Mar 2020 - Juries convene
Mar-Apr 2020 - Winners announced
Congratulations to Our 2020 Scholarship Winners!
ASLA Florida Chapter Career Discovery Scholarships
Award: $5,000
Mara Stegaru
MLA and Environmental + Urban Design Candidate, Florida International University
Mara earned her undergraduate degree in civil engineering at Northeastern University. There, she gained experience in building technology. At Florida International University, Mara’s area of focus is on developing a design process rooted in geospatial analysis and immersive community engagement. As Vice President of FIU ASLA, she creates experiential learning opportunities that emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration for successful problem-solving. Mara strives for a career that empowers communities to overcome shared challenges through direct action and playful design.
Congratulations to Our 2020 Scholarship Winners!
ASLA Florida Chapter Career Discovery Scholarships
Award: $5,000
Sebastian Hilpl
MLA Candidate, University of Florida
Sebastian earned his BS in Environmental Science from Florida State University. He was drawn to Landscape Architecture for its broad and complex scope of work. He believes the blend of design creativity and technicalities of science, construction, and engineering offer a profession within which he can discover his niche. His passions span large concepts like stormwater design and ecological restoration to the small details of construction and planting design. In his spare time, he can be found anywhere from Florida’s coastal flats fly fishing for Tarpon, to the inland marshes pursuing waterfowl.
Congratulations to Our 2020 Scholarship Winners!
Peridian International, Inc./Rae L. Price, FASLA Scholarship
Award: $5,000
Nola Talmage
BLA Candidate, UCLA
Nola lives in Los Angeles and is a mother of two girls. After graduating, she plans to become a certified Landscape Architect. Her professional background spans contemporary art, commercial photography, and architectural preservation advocacy. She offers her perspective as a mixed race African-American woman from Washington, D.C. to enrich the profession as it has been practiced in Southern California. The monuments, parks, landmarks and museums of D.C. informed her orientation to scale and intimacy in landscape design. But it is her love and awe of the arid landscapes of Southern California and the mountainous Sierras in the North that compelled her to pursue landscape architecture.
Congratulations to Our 2020 Scholarship Winners!
Steven G. King Play Environments Scholarship
Award: $5,000
Allyson Fairweather
MLA Candidate, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Allyson discovered her passion for design during her undergraduate studies in Interior Design at Endicott College. Inspired by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s “Third Place” theory, her research studied qualities of the built environment that positively promote gathering behavior, social interaction, and place-making. She chose to pursue an MLA to expand her prior research interests from interior to exterior space, and gain an interdisciplinary perspective to assist her design approach. Her current educational interests range across nature playscapes, therapeutic landscape design, and teaching hand drafting and sketching techniques to landscape architecture students.
Congratulations to Our 2020 Scholarship Winners!
Landscape Forms Scholarship in Memory of Peter Schaudt, FASLA
Award: $5,000
Claire Jarvis
BLA Candidate, University of Georgia
Claire Jarvis is from Florida by way of Chicago. She seeks to use landscape architecture as a means of restoring degraded North American landscapes to ecological health, and aspires to get others excited about the value and necessity of native trees and plants. In her free time she likes to study the interplay of plants, soils, microorganisms, animals, geology, and human life. When not in the studio or hiking, she has been known to play niche sci-fi board games, illustrate comics, ride her bike lots, and whip up some mean vegetarian cuisine
Congratulations to Our 2020 Scholarship Winners!
Douglas Dockery Thomas Fellowship in Garden History and Design
Award: $4,000
Aja Grande
PhD Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Aja is a public scholar of civic infrastructures and land ecologies as spaces of subject formation. She is an MIT PhD student in the Department of History, Anthropology, Science Technology & Society where she story tells the emergent forms of living among built environments in twentieth and twenty-first century Hawai'i. While completing her BA in Science and Society from Brown University, she founded and ran the Ethnobotany Society at Brown for students to explore the relationship between people and plants in Providence, Rhode Island. Born and raised on the island of O'ahu in Hawai'i, she has been gifted with an obligation to raise awareness about and sustain mindful relations with the ‘āina (that which feeds).
Congratulations to Our 2020 Scholarship Winners!
Douglas Dockery Thomas Fellowship in Garden History and Design
Award: $4,000
Yoni Angelo Carnice
MLA Candidate, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Yoni is a gardener and received a BS in Environmental Science from Loyola Marymount University. His previous work involved ecological restoration with the Presidio Trust in San Francisco and serving as a Climate Action Fellow for the City of Oakland. He currently studies the journals of colonial-era European plant hunters, European garden traditions and their exploitation of plants from colonized territories, and the establishment of botanical gardens in Southeast Asia. He is also interested in artists like Derek Jarman, Jamaica Kincaid, and Demetrio Braceros, who are using the garden to study and express a personal relationship to history, mortality, and community.
Congratulations to Our 2020 Scholarship Winners!
Courtland Paul Scholarship
Award $3,500
Eleanor Frey
BLA Candidate
Ellie is from Bay Village, OH (a suburb of Cleveland) and is the oldest of five kids. She is currently a junior studying landscape architecture at Ohio State University. She is involved with the Architecture, Landscape, and City Scholars program, serves as Vice President to Ohio State’s chapter of SCASLA, and volunteers as a Knowlton Ambassador, leading tours of the architecture building to prospective students. Outside of school, she loves to paint, read, write, run, and figure skate. She is currently seeking a summer internship and exploring graduate school options.
Each year, the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) offers over $90,000 through 13 different scholarships and fellowships.
LAF scholarships help diversify the pool of talent and increase academic opportunity for new generations of designers. These awards are made possible through funds established by our generous sponsors.
Each academic year, available scholarships are announced in the fall with all applications materials due February 1. Eligible candidates are undergraduate or graduate students enrolled at colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. Additional requirements vary by scholarship.
The average student debt load for landscape architecture graduates is $34,000.
To date, the Landscape Architecture Foundation has awarded $1.17 million in scholarships to over 540 students.
Madelyn Hoagland- Hanson was the 2019 recipient of the $20,000 LAF Honor Scholarship in Memory of Joe Lalli, FASLA.
