Sarah Cowles is the Director of Ruderal, based in Tbilisi. Ruderal is a landscape architecture and planning studio focused on the emerging development markets in the Caucasus region.
For Cowles, every site project is a forum to negotiate and invent new relationships of culture and ecology. She leads multidisciplinary teams to realize complex landscape-focused projects in international contexts. Her expertise in landscape planning and design spans a range of scales, including master planning for cultural institutions, ecological rehabilitation of industrial, natural disaster, and mining sites, and urban and residential landscape design. Her prior experience includes practice with TLS Landscape Architecture, where she coordinated site design of the US Consulate in Guangzhou, and large-scale urban redevelopment projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Treasure Island and Hunters Point Shipyard. As a professor of Landscape Architecture in professional programs in the United States, she has held positions at The Ohio State University, Washington University, and most recently, The University of Southern California. She is a Fulbright Scholar and recently completed a Fulbright Specialist Grant in Tbilisi. Cowles received her Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University’s GSD and her BFA from the California College of the Arts.
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