Sarah Bolivar is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Prior to teaching, Sarah worked at the Central Park Conservancy and AECOM on projects ranging from playground to waterfront designs. Focusing on the Pan-American region, from Appalachia to the Andes, her research explores how the design and stewardship of built environments can contribute to both human and more-than-human health. As part of this work, she investigates how people’s stewardship practices across diverse landscapes – farms, nonprofit-managed lands, and state parks – influence migratory wildlife movement across the Americas. Through multidisciplinary partnerships and fieldwork, her scholarship advocates for multispecies empathy, relationality, and reciprocity – approaches that honor plural ways of knowing and inhabiting landscapes. Harnessing the power of storytelling (visual, written, and oral), her work invites speculation to build more just worlds.
Education
Bachelor of Urban and Environmental Planning, University of Virginia
Master of Landscape Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Expertise & Interests
- Multispecies empathy
- Biodiversity
- Storytelling
- Landscape Stewardship