Urban designer Anya Domlesky is currently the Director of Research and an associate principal at SWA. She runs XL Lab, the firm’s innovation group, which undertakes practice-based research. As a designer, Anya focuses on landscape-driven urban design and environmental planning. She has largely worked on issues involving urbanization, coasts, and water—in Belgrade, the San Francisco Bay Area, Haiti, Louisiana, the Great Lakes, Siberia, South Florida, and New York City. Her research on the built environment focuses on scales beyond the designed site: smaller, at the scale of a material, and larger, at the scale of cities and regions, looking at infrastructure, natural resources, and drivers in the process of urban building and unbuilding. Her research has been shown at the both the Venice Biennale of Architecture and the Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, and been covered in The Guardian, The Atlantic’s CityLab, Places Journal, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Mark magazine, and Fast Company. She has previously worked at the New York City Department of City Planning and Hood Design, lectured internationally, and taught at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Boston Architectural College. She holds an MLA from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and an M.Arch II from McGill University.

Anya has been a member of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) and the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) since 2014, and of the Urban Land Institute since 2021. She is a registered landscape architect in the State of California (#6447).

M. Arch II, McGill University

MLA, Harvard University Graduate School of Design