No place holds one, singular story. Every place is contested, complex, layered, and full of both histories and futures.  Thaisa Way, Director of Gardens and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, will explore how we have come to understand a longer and more complex history of the land within which Dumbarton Oaks sits. We explore the land as an archive and as a future. It is ancestral and kin lands for the Piscataway and a place that was realized through the labor and living of enslaved people and communities. It is a land that has been witness to communities and the changes they made in the landscape over thousands of years. Land is not a stage on which history takes place, it is not a neutral site but rather shapes how we make place for our communities. This talk will share what we are learning and consider how this might shape how we imagine the future of our historic landscapes and gardens.

Dr. Way holds a PhD from Cornell University, a Master of Architectural History from the University of Virginia, and a BS from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (2016) and a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (2018). She was awarded the CELA Outstanding Educator Award in 2019 and the Mercedes Bass Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome in 2023. She is a scholar of landscape history teaching in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University and previously at the College of Built Environments, University of Washington, Seattle. As a leader in the academy, Dr. Way was elected Chair of Faculty Senate at the University of Washington (2016-2019) and continues to mentor scholar/ leaders in universities across the nation.