SERVICES > Governor's Arts Awards > 2012 GAA Award Winners
2012 GAA Emerging Leader Award
Anne Trumble (Omaha)
Anne Trumble is the Founder and Executive Director of Emerging Terrain, a nonprofit research and design collaborative with a mission to engage the public in factors shaping the built environment. The organization focuses on reviving and reinvigorating spaces, places, and structures in the urban landscape. Trumble, although formally educated in landscape architecture, attributes a life-long interest in landscape, land use, and the embedded human narrative while growing up on the family's homesteaded farm south of Omaha. Watching the city change and grow around a multi-generational legacy of land stewardship has provided Anne a unique perspective to and guidance in her life's work.
Prior to founding Emerging Terrain, Anne studied and practiced many aspects of landscape architecture nationally and abroad. Most recently she was responsible for the design and management of West 125th Streetscape in Harlem with the NYC Economic Development Corporation, in addition to other streetscapes, greenroofs, parks, and plazas throughout New York City. Through this role often requiring complicated negotiations and community engagement, Anne discovered she most enjoys the management of diverse teams - stakeholders, contractors, city agencies, other designers, and community groups - towards a common built goal.
Trumble earned a Masters of Landscape Architecture from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she also practiced at a firm designing and building public landscapes in France, Italy, Russia, and throughout Canada. During her graduate work at UBC, she spent a semester in Tokyo, Japan studying architecture and a summer in Havana, Cuba conducting urban development research. Anne considers her first move away from the farm to earn a degree in Horticulture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln the 'groundwork' for what has since transpired. Her years designing exhibits and other projects at Henry Doorly Zoo exposed her to the visionary pragmatism of Dr. Lee Simmons, leaving a long lasting mark in Anne's ability to make big ideas a reality. Since returning to Omaha in 2010, Anne serves on the board of directors for Design Alliance Omaha, has taught a city-scale design course combining architects and landscape architects at UNL, and consults on numerous community projects.
With Emerging Terrain, Anne's leadership seeks to combine diverse methods and best practices of art, design, community engagement, and philanthropy to realize what is possible in our contemporary landscape. The organization continues to grow in scope and ambition. In 2012, Emerging Terrain will be expanding the first phase of grain elevator banners with a second iteration and corresponding large community event on a bridge over Interstate-80, a collaborative temporary streetscape project along Leavenworth Street with the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, and a large-scale mapping and cultural archiving of the suburban/rural edges of Omaha. These undertakings will be conducted by an inaugural group of Urban Design Fellows who will work together in a building Emerging Terrain is renovating in the Historic Vinton Street District in South Omaha.
