Executive Officers

founder + President
Charles A. Birnbaum FASLA
Washington, DC

Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR, is the Founder and President of The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Prior to joining TCLF, Mr. Birnbaum spent fifteen years as the coordinator of the National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative and a decade in private practice with a focus on landscape preservation and urban design. Mr. Birnbaum’ most recent projects include the award-winning on-line series, Cultural Landscapes as Classrooms and editing Design with Culture: Claiming America’s Landscape Heritage for the University Press of Virginia. He has also edited Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture and its follow-up publication, Making Post-War Landscapes Visible for Spacemaker Press, Pioneers of American Landscape Design (McGraw Hill Companies, June 2000) and now Volume II due out in late-2008. In 1995, the ASLA awarded the Initiative the President's Award of Excellence and in 1996 inducted Mr. Birnbaum as a Fellow of the Society. Mr. Birnbaum served as a Loeb Fellow in 1998 at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design during which time he founded TCLF. Mr. Birnbaum is an instructor for the National Preservation Institute and in 2004 was awarded the Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and spent spring/summer of that year at the American Academy in Rome. Most recently he is the 2007 recipient of the LaGasse Medal from the Association of Landscape Architects..

Treasurer
Jan Rothschild

See Board Profile.

Secretary
Piera M. Weiss
Silver Spring, Maryland

Ms. Weiss received an MLA from Cornell University and a BA in classical languages from Harpur College at SUNY Binghamton. Ms. Weiss is a licensed landscape architect and planner, and has, since 1980, worked on numerous private and public projects. Additionally, from 1982 to 1992, Ms. Weiss taught in the Landscape Design Program at the Center for Continuing Education, George Washington University and managed the program in 1983-1984. In 1987, Ms. Weiss served as administrator of the National Association of Olmsted Parks, developing workshops and seminars with national partners, and instituting financial reforms.

 

TCLF Staff

Project Manager
Melanie Macchio
Washington, DC

Melanie Macchio is Project Manager for the Cultural Landscape Foundation. Ms. Macchio has a Master of Arts degree in Cultural Resource Management from the University of California, Riverside and a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Lake Forest College in Illinois. Prior to joining TCLF, Melanie worked for private preservation firms in La Jolla, California, and, more recently, Washington, D.C. She has managed several large-scale historic resource survey projects including the Uptown San Diego Historic Resources Survey and the Purcellville, Virginia, National Historic District Survey, as well as intensive multiple property surveys for the City of Riverside, California.

Project Manager
Nancy Slade
Washington, DC

Nancy Slade comes to TCLF after working at the National Park Service, Historic Landscape Initiative (HLI) in Washington, D.C. There her job responsibilities included; the management of the Index of Designed American Landscapes database. She also coordinated several HLI publications, including, Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture II (2004); Design with Culture (2005), and Pioneers of American Landscape Design II (University of Virginia Press, 2008.) In addition, she has authored essays on John Simonds and Lester Collins, which will be included in Pioneers II. She holds a Masters of Landscape Architecture from Virginia Tech.