Jenny Lauer

Jenny joined Nelson Byrd Woltz in 2019. She holds a BA in environmental studies from Allegheny College and an MLA from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Jenny is a landscape designer and cultural landscape historian working at the intersection of NBW’s culture, design, and conservation agriculture teams. Jenny brings a specialization in creatively synthesizing archival documentation, oral histories, historic mapping, and other data to inform responsible design and interpretation of cultural landscapes.

Since joining NBW, Jenny has played a role in the comprehensive planning, preservation, activation, and stewardship of cultural landscapes across the U.S. including the Angel Oak Preserve, Middleton Place, and the Miles Brewton House in Charleston SC; Colonial Williamsburg; the John and Alice Coltrane Home in Dix Hills, NY; Winterthur Museum and Gardens, Mt. Cuba Center, and Hagley Museum in Delaware; Sylvester Manor Educational Farm in Shelter Island, NY; Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, NY; Edgewater Farm in Charlotte, NC; Glen Leven Farm in Nashville, TN; and Eldon Farms in Woodville, VA. She currently manages NBW’s on-call consultancy with the Garden Club of Virginia, informing the stewardship of over 50 historic and culturally significant publicly accessible gardens across the Commonwealth.  

Jenny has guest lectured at the Rhode Island School of Design, Pratt Institute, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and Temple University, and volunteers on the City of Charlottesville Board of Architectural Review. She is a past Board Member of the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation and the Preservation Association of Central New York and recently co-authored a chapter in An Accessible Past: Making Historic Sites Accessible (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024), edited by Heather Pressman. Prior to joining NBW, Jenny worked for the Center for Cultural Landscape Preservation (CCLP) at SUNY-ESF and was the publication assistant for Anne Godfrey’s Active Landscape Photography: Theoretical Groundwork for Landscape Architecture (Routledge, 2020).