We are happy to announce the final jurors for the 2026 WLA Awards: these four jurors join the other four professional awards jurors – Niels de Bruin, Stephanie Lau, Chris Tidwell and Cindy Zerger. The eight jurors for the Professional Awards bring a broad range of experience and knowledge to the judging of this years Professional Awards.
Professional Jury
Kate Larsen, Director at Snøhetta, has been designing and building vibrant, beautiful, and highly functional public spaces for over 20 years. Kate lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and is a registered Landscape Architect in the state of New York (United States). Her areas of expertise include designing in tight urban conditions and navigating large, complex client and stakeholder groups within public and cultural institutions. Kate delights in interweaving existing sites and cultural histories into designs to provide new life in already loved spaces.
Terence Lee is an accomplished landscape architect with more than 25 years of global experience, currently Senior Landscape Architect Associate at DIALOG in Calgary. His career has evolved through collaborations with some of the field’s most influential figures—Dan Kiley, George Hargreaves, and Peter Walker—as well as with the renowned interdisciplinary firm EDAW (now AECOM). Across hospital campuses, civic spaces, and large-scale urban masterplans, his early work established a foundation of precision, clarity, and a deep respect for the relationship between land, architecture, and people.
Yuan Songting, Professorate Senior Engineer, Registered Urban Planner, is the founder, Chairman, and the principal designer of a Beijing-based, award-winning design firm, DDON, best known for its full-scale integrated business segments, and has become the leading design agency in China over the past decades. Mr Yuan has always been positive in practising Chinese design projects from a deeper, more socially responsible perspective to maximise respect for history and local culture without losing the beauty of art.
Special Juror – Charles A. Birnbaum is President + CEO, The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF). Prior to creating TCLF, Birnbaum spent fifteen years as the coordinator of the National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative (HLI) and a decade in private practice in New York City, with a focus on landscape preservation and urban design.
Birnbaum’s major projects: creation of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, which includes a $100,000 (USD) award; the web-based initiative What’s Out There (a searchable database of the nation’s designed landscape heritage); some twenty video oral histories with significant practitioners; and more. He is a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and has authored and edited numerous publications, including: Experiencing Olmsted: The Enduring Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted’s North American Landscapes (Timber Press, 2022); Shaping the Postwar Landscape, (UVA Press, 2018) and many more books.