Core Faculty Ken Byrne, Academic Director + Humanities Ken joined the faculty in 2003, with primary responsibility for the humanities and as curriculum coordinator. An educator for 25 years, Ken brings a wide range of experience, from teaching secondary school in Macau, to educational design consulting for an environmental non-governmental organization in the Philippines, to teaching college writing and creative nonfiction at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Ken has been active in projects linking environmental and social health to community development efforts, both in the Connecticut River Valley region and abroad. Interdisciplinary by inclination, Ken draws on geography, philosophy, economics, anthropology, education, psychology, and literary theory to examine the relationship between people and the environment. He is interested in alternative EdD, University of Massachusetts MEd, University of Massachusetts BA (honors), English, Brown Univ.
concepts of economy and community, and believes that one of the functions of education should be to unsettle fixed or conventional notions of the individual, nature, society, and development.
Kate Cholakis ’11, Ecological Design Kate is a landscape designer who created her own business after graduating from the Conway School. She specialized in ecological landscape design for residential clients and large-scale landscapes. Prior to returning to Conway to teach, Kate was a project designer in green infrastructure planning at Nitsch Engineering in Boston, where she contributed to master plans for college campuses, design competitions, and permitting applications for large-scale developments. After a summer fellowship at the Cultural Landscape Foundation in Washington, DC, Kate began teaching at Conway in August 2015. A common thread underlying Kate’s professional work is developing a design process that emphasizes thorough analysis of cultural, physical, MA, Landscape Design, The Conway School BA, Architecture and Urbanism, Smith College
and temporal aspects of a site. With a multidisciplinary background, Kate applies strong skills in ecological landscape design, green infrastructure and stormwater planning, digital and hand graphics, cultural landscape research, and report writing to her practice and teaching.
Kim Erslev, Design and Graphics Kim is both a practicing architect and landscape architect with her own firm, Salmon Falls Ecological Design, based in Shelburne Falls. She has worked with several design firms on a diversity of projects including: the design of the Micmac Heritage Center in Northern Canada, the Jerusalem Science Museum, the Greenfield Energy Park, the Eric Carle Museum, and Greenfield Community College’s Outdoor Learning Laboratory. Her current design practice focuses on the design of ecological and productive landscapes, super-insulated passive and active solar homes, institutional master plans, and co-housing communities. Kim joined the faculty of the Conway School in 2006 and teaches landscape design, graphics, and site engineering. She is dedicated to supporting students to MLA, Univ. of Massachusetts MArch, Univ. of Pennsylvania BA, Wesleyan University
design healthy human ecosystems, and to create a seamless connection between the built environment, landscapes, and the natural world.
For a complete listing of Conway School staff and faculty, please visit our website at csld.edu/about/faculty.
16 The Conway School Graduate Program in Sustainable Landscape Planning + Design
