About

Tess is an urban planner, researcher, and designer. She holds a Master’s in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She currently works as an urban planner at Field Operations in New York.

She previously worked as a strategist project manager on Michael Bierut’s team at Pentagram Design. She received a BA with honors in History from Yale University, where she specialized in historiography and 19th century German militarism.

Her work at M.I.T. ranged from urban design projects to historical geography papers. Her academic interests range from history, to cartography, to ecology, to landscape aesthetics, and placemaking, particularly on postindustrial sites. She’s also interested in the history of phased development approaches and the rise of “meanwhile uses.” For her thesis project, she wrote a history of development at what today is called “Suffolk Downs,” in East Boston, and explored potential futures of neighboring sites.