Judith Kinnard, FAIA is a leader in architectural education and an award-winning designer. Kinnard is currently Professor and Harvey-Wadsworth Chair of Landscape Urbanism at the Tulane School of Architecture, and started her teaching career at Syracuse University in 1979, shortly after completing her professional degree at Cornell. She was one of the first women teaching design studios at Syracuse, Princeton and the University of Virginia and was the first woman architect to be tenured at the University of Virginia. She taught at Virginia for twenty-two years where she served as chair of the architecture department from 1998-2003. She is the past-president of the National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). In 2018 she was recognized as an ACSA Distinguished Professor and in 2011, she was named one of the 25 Most Admired Educators by Design Intelligence.
Throughout her career, she has maintained an active commitment to practice. Her work has included numerous small-scale built commissions, and more than a dozen national competitions dealing with larger-scale issues of urban design, cultural institutions, and housing. She has received awards from the Virginia AIA, Louisiana AIA, the New Orleans AIA, and the Louisiana USGBC. Her essays on urban themes have been published by the Harvard Architecture Review and the Journal of Garden History. Her perspectives on the past and future of architectural education have been shared in two recent publications. “Catalyst: Trajectories and Lineages” (Actar 2016) and “Chronologies of and Architectural Pedagogy” (UPR 2015). In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Judith talks about her tenure in academia and in practice, and being the “first” of something, advising young architects to design their future.
