Alison B. Hirsch, PhD, FAAR is a landscape theorist, historian and designer who explores the spatial politics and performative dimensions of landscape. She is Associate Professor and Director of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the University of Southern California and co-founder of foreground design agency (www.foreground-da.com). She additionally founded and directs the Landscape Justice Initiative at USC (https://sites.usc.edu/landscape-justice-initiative/). She is author of City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). She is currently developing a book and exhibition on the working agricultural landscapes of the San Joaquin Valley, a territory of extreme inequality and risk, as well as another book titled The Performative Landscape. She is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (2017-2018) and was recently a Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Fellow for Innovation and Leadership (2019-2020).