Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is the president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. A native of San Antonio, Texas, she earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from Wellesley College and a master’s degree in city planning from Yale University. A resident of New York City since 1964, Rogers was the first person to hold the title of Central Park administrator, a New York City Department of Parks & Recreation position created by Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1979. She was the founding president of the Central Park Conservancy, the public-private partnership created in 1980 to bring citizen support to the restoration and renewed management of Central Park. She served in both positions until 1996. She is the author of nine books.
Tony Hiss, who was a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than thirty years and is now a visiting scholar at New York University, is the author of thirteen books, including In Motion: The Experience of Travel and the award-winning The Experience of Place. His next book is about the twenty-first-century challenge to prevent a mass extinction crisis by setting aside half the planet for other species.