Nancy Pollock-Ellwand, B.L.A., M. Arch, PhD (Planning); AALA; OALA and, ICOMOS-IFLA, serves as the Dean of the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. Before moving to the desert she served as the Dean of the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary, and was very proud to see the launch of the newest M.L.A. program in Canada during her tenure. Before her deanship in Calgary she was Head and Chair of the School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, at the University of Adelaide, Australia. And previous to that Nancy served for many years as both an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Guelph, teaching landscape architecture history and design studios.
Nancy’s professional work and research has focused on cultural landscape history, interpretation and protection. She has published extensively on early Canadian landscape architects who studied and worked with Frederick Law Olmsted.
They influentially imported Olmsted’s ideas to Canada. In the course of her research work, she uncovered previously unknown papers of the Olmsted-trained Canadian landscape architect, Gordon Culham. She now serves at an international level as the Co-Chair of the World Heritage Evaluation Panel for the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS). This Panel work takes Nancy frequently to Paris but in her deliberations, she gets to consider globally significant landscapes from Greenland and the Middle East, to Micronesia and Africa. In every case of World Heritage, she marvels at the profound importance of landscapes, and in turn the great privilege we all have as landscape architects to connect with land, people and the values and meaning embedded there.