Signe Nielsen

Member since: 2026

Proposed by: Garden Club of Orange and Dutchess Counties, Zone III

Seconded by: Rye Garden Club, Zone III

Founding principal of New York-based Matthews Nielsen Landscape Architects and adjunct professor at Pratt Institute School of Architecture, Signe Nielsen's designs are renewing the landscape of New York City. She collaborated on the design of the compact two-plus-acre Little Island suspended over the Hudson River and developed the comprehensive master plan for the second largest park in Manhattan--the 550-acre Hudson River Park. She served on the New York City Public Design Committee under mayors Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio.

Her firm has been instrumental in the design of New York's East River Esplanade, The Hills on Governor's Island, Idlewild Park Nature Center, Rockefeller University River Campus, the South Bronx Greenway, and Yale University's Upper Science Hill campus. She recently completed a landscape master plan for her alma mater Smith College.

When asked by Pratt News in 2021 what she foresees for New York City's future, she replied, "New York City, like many dense urban areas, is essentially out of readily available land waiting to be developed as parkland... Hence the need to look for sites that have been abandoned, neglected, underutilized, or contaminated, and imagine how they can be repurposed, reimagined, cleaned up (decontaminated), and designed for a resilient future for both the environment and people. Many of these sites are along our waterfronts--former industrial, manufacturing, or warehousing areas--and others are complexly interwoven with surface and subsurface infrastructure."

Nielsen is a GCA Gold Star speaker who has lectured to garden clubs across the US.