Paca, Barbara

Bio

BARBARA PACA, OBE, PHD

WORK

Professional work involves the thirty-year operation of a landscape architectural firm in New York City, Oxford, Maryland and Paris, working globally to develop a new aesthetic, promoting the use of native plants, environmental conservation, historic preservation, accessibility, and community building.

Art historian and landscape architect with a PhD (Princeton University) and many postdoctoral fellowships, including a Fulbright and post at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, as well as Expert Member status of ICOMOS ICAHM as well as ICOMOS IFLA International Scientific Committee on Cultural Landscapes.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan four-year appointment as Trustee to the Maryland Historic Trust in 2018 in recognition of work in preservation and documenting the legacies of early African American families. I am currently serving as Cultural Envoy to Antigua and Barbuda and the Curator for Antigua and Barbuda’s National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Recognized by Her Majesty the Queen with an OBE in 2018 for lifetime achievement in historic preservation and the protection of intangible cultural heritage.

Author of Frank Walter, The Last Universal Man (2017); Ruth Starr Rose: Revelations of African American Life in Maryland and the World (2015); and the Frank Walter Catalogue for 2013 at Art Basel, Miami Beach. Editor of Environmental Justice as a Civil Right, National Pavilion Catalogue for Antigua and Barbuda, Venice Biennale, 2018.

EDUCATION

1989-1995 Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, Doctoral Degree, Department of Art and Archaeology

1986-1989 Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, Master of Fine Arts

1982-1983 St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD, Exchange student

1977-1983 University of Oregon, Eugene, Five-Year Professional Bachelor of Landscape Architecture and BA from The Honors College

SELECTED ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL HONORS

2018 Visiting Scholar at the Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School University and Parsons in NYC

1996 Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. Studied intellectual context of 18th-c. gardens

1994 Fulbright Fellowship for Postdoctoral Study in Ireland. Program involved the research and

publication of a folio of 18th-century drawings of garden buildings in Ireland

1992 ICOMOS award travel scholarship for gardens of Poland and Eastern Germany

1990 and 1991 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, Doctoral research, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

1990 James Marston Fitch Charitable Trust Fellowship. First award for research and publication of work involving geometric theories of terracing and planting in restoring historic landscapes

1987 and 1988 Italian Studies Committee, Princeton University. Fellowship to document and study relationship between built and natural environment in the 16th-c. Villa Lante Bagnaia, President of Italy’s Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome and his summer palace, Farnese Palace at Caprarola