Chelina Odbert
Chelina Odbert is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), a non-profit that uses urban planning, landscape architecture, research, and community organizing to build a more just public realm. Straddling different disciplines, scales, and project types, her work is linked by a common purpose: to build community power and ensure that where you live does not determine how you live.
A leader in her field, Odbert has been recognized by the United Nations, the Aspen Institute, the Knight Foundation Fellows, and Ashoka Changemakers. Because of her ground-breaking work addressing the un-public nature of public space, she and her firm won a 2021 Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York. In 2022, KDI received the prestigious National Design Award in Landscape Architecture from the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Museum.
Odbert has held teaching appointments at Harvard GSD, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and the Claremont Colleges. She lectures extensively about equitable communities and has written about sustainable development in a range of publications, including authoring The World Bank Handbook of Gender-Inclusive Urban Planning and Design and contributing to Just Urban Design, Designing Peace, and Now Urbanism.
Odbert earned a master of Urban Planning from Harvard GSD and a bachelor of arts with high honors from Claremont McKenna College.