Sierra Bainbridge

RLA , ASLA

Senior Principal, Landscape Architecture

Boston, MA, USA

Sierra seeks to create spaces of research, engagement and collaboration that enable contextually grounded, novel, and impactful design solutions to emerge in service of communities, municipalities, institutions and thought leaders who are each in their own way, solving for our greatest challenges, inequities and crises. Her practice begins with openness, curiosity, warmth, and optimism, drawing on deep interdisciplinary experience to deliver projects that offer tangible proof of what is possible.

As a founder and Senior Principal at MASS, Sierra directs the Landscape Studio and Abundant Futures Lab. She leads many of MASS’s most complex and transformative projects across landscape, memorial, architectural, and land-use design. With a background blending landscape, architecture, ecology, and regional planning, she is committed to comprehensive, cross-disciplinary approaches, applying design techniques and landscape metrics that demonstrate humanity’s capacity to respond boldly to climate change and to create a more abundant future for all species. From early work on the High Line and Fresh Kills Park to more recent efforts like the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA) and the Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, her projects reveal the power of design to catalyze ecological and societal abundance. This work has been recognized for design excellence, research and analysis, and sustainability by the AIA, ASLA, COTE, and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards.

Sierra also works to evolve the design professions through teaching and service. She served on the Landscape Architecture Foundation Board from 2019 and continues as Board Emeritus. She is the recipient of the Berkeley Rupp Prize for career achievement, supporting her ongoing design research on Tipping Points and Planetary Boundaries as Practitioner in Residence 2023–2025.

A curious and creative educator, Sierra brings tremendous energy, optimism, and a willingness to take risks in designing learning experiences that inspire students and help them surface unique responses to the challenges they observe, equipping them with the tools to become the next generation of changemakers in the design profession. Sierra teaches landscape, architecture and cross disciplinary graduate studios & seminars at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, UC Berkeley, the Boston Architectural College, and the University of Rwanda, where she also served as department head. She has played a central role in shaping innovative curricula in both the Global North and Majority South, including for the African Design Center’s Graduate Program, the Faculty of Architecture and Environmental Design at the University of Rwanda, and RICA’s One Health & Food Systems curriculum. Sierra holds dual master’s degrees in Landscape Architecture and Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Architectural History from Smith College.