Judith Kinnard

Professor of Architecture

Harvey-Wadsworth Chair of Landscape Urbanism

Judith Kinnard, FAIA is nationally recognized for her impact as a leader in architectural education. In addition, she is a highly regarded teacher and award-winning designer.

Throughout her career, Kinnard has maintained an active commitment to practice and has developed an approach characterized by sensitive and innovative solutions to issues of site and program.

She received the ACSA Distinguished Professor award in 2018. She is the past-president of the NAAB and the ACSA. Kinnard started her teaching career at Syracuse University in 1979, shortly after completing her professional degree at Cornell University. 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 22 years and served as chair of the architecture department from 1998-2003. She has been active in professional, and community-focused organizations, holding seats on various advisory boards, including Tulane’s Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design. In 2011, she was named one ofthe 25 Most Admired Educators by Design Intelligence. She was awarded a fellowship by the AIA in 2004 for leadership in architectural education.

Kinnard’s academic interests are varied and have focused on site design and urban housing. 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).

Throughout her career, she has maintained an active commitment to practice and has developed an approach characterized by sensitive and innovative solutions to issues of site and program. 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 won five of these national design competitions and placed 2nd in the New Housing New York Design Ideas Competition sponsoredby the NYAIA and the City Council in 2004. In 2006, she was named a finalist in the High Density on the High Ground Competition, and a semifinalist in the Global Green Competition for New Orleans. Her housing proposal for Charlottesville, Virginia won a Design Excellence award from the VSAIA in 2008. In July 2010, she won an invited competition for a sustainable disaster relief house prototype (in collaboration with Assistant Professor Tiffany Lin). A version of this concept was built in New Orleans in 2011 and was recently recognized by FEMA. Her recent work with the Small Center in the Hollygrove neighborhood received awards from the Louisiana AIA, the New Orleans AIA and the Louisiana USGBC in 2017 and 2018. The construction of this project was funded by a grant from the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board’s green infrastructure program.