Eliza Shaw Valk

Profession and title: 
Architect
Brief biography: 

Eliza is an artist and landscape architect. She works at the landscape architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand and aims to bring design excellence to New Haven’s public spaces. She’s project manager for the Mill River Trail, currently under construction, which travels through the center of the city, connecting East Rock Park to Long Island Sound. Not far from the river Eliza runs an art studio exploring the intersection of light and form in large-scale installations. Through massing and reordering mundane, often rejected, materials, her work explores structure and improvisation, the materials acting as registrations of mechanical processes and the mechanism for capturing transitory events. Eliza holds two master’s degrees, in landscape architecture and city planning, from Penn. She was trained as a dancer and her B.A., from Oberlin, is in visual and performing arts.