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Meet Monique Bassey: 2021 Marie Bickham Chair in Landscape Architecture

Monique BasseyMonique Bassey is the 2021 Marie M. Bickham Chair in the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture. A driven and talented landscape designer, Bassey’s education and work experience has taken her to Hong Kong, and Palestine. She is enthusiastic about bringing diverse perspectives to her project teams, contributing to more innovative and creative design solutions. Her versatile project skills include master planning, conceptual design, rendering and modeling, and construction documents.

Her experience spans a variety of project types, including neighborhood plans, university campus plans, community engagement, site design, streetscape design and outreach initiatives. Regardless of the type projects, from plaza design to district framework plans, Bassey brings valuable and unique insights, strong technical skills, and a passionate effort. In addition, she has also received national recognition as the winner of the high-profile “Give a Park, Get a Park” Design Competition for the City of Detroit. In 2018, she was selected to be a participant of the UNESCO World Heritage Young Professionals Forum in Manama, Bahrain. In 2019, she was selected to be a participant of the UNESCO Biennale of Luanda, Pan-African Culture of Peace Forum in Luanda, Angola.

Bassey is an active member of the Black Landscape Architects Network and also serves as the United States diaspora lead on the UNESCO Pan-African Youth Ad-Hoc Committee; and a passionate member of ASLA. She serves on the ASLA Northern California Chapter Executive Committee as the vice president and chair of the Emerging Professionals and Student Chapter committee. Nationally, she serves on the ASLA Committee on Education, collectively working to increase student chapter and faculty support, advocate for landscape architecture to become a STEM discipline and address the gaps of structural racism that occur within university programs and curriculum.

She is “hopeful that these necessary changes in academia will empower the next generation to build a legacy of activism, advocacy and leadership that speaks to a diverse and unified voice of the future.”

Bassey is a Los Angeles native and has been a landscape designer at MIG in Berkeley. She holds both a Bachelor of Architecture and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Arizona.