Introducing TCLF’s 2025 Summer Fellows
TCLF is pleased to welcome two recent graduates to its Summer 2025 Fellowship Program. Selected from a diverse and impressive pool of applicants, Marieke van Asselt is this year’s Sally Boasberg Founder’s Fellow. The fellowship was established to honor the invaluable contributions that TCLF’s Founding Co-Chair Sally Boasberg made to landscape stewardship, patronage, and education throughout her life. Susan Gonzalez, a Master of Landscape Architecture student at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) joins HOCKER in Dallas, Texas as TCLF’s Danette Gentile Kauffman Cultural Landscape Fellow.
Originally from Los Angeles, Marieke van Asselt was inspired by natural landscapes and their cultural potential when, at a young age, she witnessed the bubbling prehistoric tar at the La Brea Tar Pits and some time later discovered a fallen buffalo on Catalina Island. After completing her undergraduate studies in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Edinburgh, she continued her studies at Columbia University in New York City, where she recently graduated with a M.S. in Historic Preservation. Her master’s thesis examined recent initiatives in New York City to preserve public housing and considered how these efforts serve as restorative justice for a complex history of urban renewal and institutional neglect. As an undergraduate, her honor thesis examined how landscapes within early Garden City planning imparted a social ethos, and accordingly, how that concept of a social landscape was critical to social housing models in Southern California in the early twentieth century. As the Sally Boasberg Founder’s Fellow, she is looking forward to applying her research background in public housing and social and environmental justice to expand the What’s Out There database.
Susan Gonzalez is the 2025 Danette Gentile Kauffman Fellow, based this year at HOCKER in Dallas, Texas. She is currently a Master of Landscape Architecture student at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Sustainable Urban Design as part of the program’s first graduating class. Her work focuses on advancing community resilience, public health, and environmental justice. She has served as a Flood Research Analyst and Transportation Planning Intern with the North Central Texas Council of Governments. At UTA, she contributed to projects including “Rewilding Johnson Creek” and the UTA West Gateway Master Plan. Her undergraduate capstone project, “Sustainable Community Hotspot in East Arlington,” focused on permaculture.
Passionate about creating public spaces that support equity and sustainability, she has worked on proposals for community gardens and urban agriculture. As a Dallas native, she looks forward to researching and documenting, significant cultural and ecological landscapes to expand the What’s Out There database and lay the foundation for a future What’s Out There Weekend in Dallas.
