Mia Lehrer FASLA

Founder & President

Mia Lehrer, FASLA, is Founder and President of Studio-MLA, the landscape architecture and urban design practice she built to improve the quality of urban life. The daughter of German and Brazilian immigrants, she was raised in El Salvador, where nature was always present and palpable, and she has since spent her career treating design as a form of advocacy for communities, ecosystems, and the public places where both thrive.

‘Advocacy by Design’ is her phrase and her practice. Mia has always seen the city’s forgotten places — its rivers, landfills, and floodplains, its empty parking lots, asphalt schoolyards, and derelict streetscapes — as its richest reserve of public life. She has built an approach the firm still works by, convening coalitions of neighbors, scientists, agencies, and institutions that bring it into being, work that takes shape as museum gardens turning cultural institutions outward toward their neighborhoods, stadium districts conceived as parkland, natural parks that return habitat and shade to dense city blocks, and river plans that turn flood infrastructure into public spaces for people and nature, for millions.

Her completed works include SoFi Stadium and the Hollywood Park redevelopment, where the former Hollywood Park Racetrack became a mixed-use urban district woven with parks and public open space. Honored by ASLA, AIA, and others, the district hosted matches of the 2026 FIFA World Cup and is slated to host the opening ceremonies of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Her built work also includes Vista Hermosa Natural Park, recognized with an ASLA Landmark Award; the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and NHM Commons; Stanford University’s Frost Amphitheater and Arboretum Master Plan; fifteen years of renovation at Dodger Stadium elevating the fan experience through terraces, walkways, shade, and gathering places; the Annenberg Community Beach House; Levi Strauss headquarters and Levi’s Plaza revitalization in San Francisco; and the celebrated restorations of both historic Barnsdall Art Park and Beverly Gardens Park, a nearly 2-mile linear promenade with fountains and sculptures and tree canopy.

Her current work includes major cultural and civic projects across California, among them the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, opening September 2026, whose campus, gardens, and site features celebrate storytelling that Sam Lubell of the Los Angeles Times has already called “a wonderful surprise”; Puente Hills Landfill Park, formerly the nation’s largest landfill and set to become the first new regional park in Los Angeles County in three decades; the restoration of Eaton Canyon Natural Area following the 2025 Los Angeles fires; the Holocaust Museum of Los Angeles; the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach; the California Indian Heritage Center at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers, and many others. In preparation for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Mia and the firm are supporting LA Metro on public realm improvements across Los Angeles.

Rivers run through all of it. Her work along the Los Angeles River spans three decades and dozens of projects, from the seminal Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan to the Upper Los Angeles River and Tributaries Plan and Taylor Yard G2 River Park, a body of work chronicled in Michael Kimmelman’s 2022 New York Times feature on the river’s remaking. Related work extends along the Santa Ana, San Gabriel, and Sacramento Rivers and internationally to the Rio Tietê feasibility study in São Paulo, Nuevo Sur in Monterrey, the Friendship Garden at the Great Wall of China in Beijing, and the Bosque Los Pericos in her native San Salvador.

Mia has advised numerous public agencies and institutions over her career. She was a presidential appointee to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts under President Barack Obama and a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Commissioner on the department’s first board made up entirely of women. She currently sits on the boards of Friends of the Los Angeles River, the Los Angeles Parks Foundation, and the Los Angeles Business Council. Her earlier appointments include the board of the Landscape Architecture Foundation and advisory roles with the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, the Los Angeles Zoning Advisory Committee, and the Hollywood Design Review Committee. She has also reviewed designs for national memorials in Washington, D.C., joined the Walton Family Foundation’s Design Excellence Committee, and been a Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commissioner.

Mia speaks internationally, with keynotes from Sydney to Tel Aviv and Syracuse to Vancouver, talks at MoCA, MoMA, and the Getty Center, and university lectures at UCLA, USC, and Stanford, among many others. Mia was also a visiting instructor at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and USC. She is featured in the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (Park Books, October 2026), and is a contributing author to Latinas in Landscape Architecture, Volume I (FigFactor Media, International Women’s Day 2027). A collection of her work will soon be held at the National Academy of Design in New York.

Mia was educated at Tufts University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and an elected member of the National Academy of Design, her honors include the 2026 LAF Medal, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum National Design Award in Landscape Architecture, the ASLA LaGasse Medal, the Los Angeles Times L.A. Influential Award, the Westside Urban Forum’s John L. Chase Legacy Award, and the American Jewish Committee’s Yellin Community Leadership Award. Under her leadership, Studio-MLA has been named one of Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies and has earned hundreds of design awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects, the American Institute of Architects, the American Planning Association, the U.S. Green Building Council, the California Preservation Foundation, the Los Angeles Conservancy, the Society for College and University Planning, and other major professional associations.