Outstanding Alumni Award 2025: Michael Van Valkenburgh ’73

Bio

Michael Van Valkenburgh is the creative director of MVVA, the landscape architecture firm he founded in 1982. His leadership of the firm is an extension of his passion for landscape as a living artistic medium that deepens and enriches people's lives through the confluence of aesthetics, technology, and ecology. He has combined his love of cities and the energy of urban living with the lessons of his childhood on a dairy farm in rural New York State, where economy of means was a constant priority.

Michael earned a BS in landscape architecture from Cornell University and a Master of Fine Arts in landscape architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Michael is the Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture, Emeritus, at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where he taught for almost four decades. Michael received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in 1989. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. Michael is the author of Designing a Garden (2019) and Brooklyn Bridge Park (2021), both published by The Monacelli Press.