A multidisciplinary designer from Charlotte, North Carolina, Walter Hood is globally recognized for his contributions to art, landscape architecture, urbanism, and research. He founded Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California, in 1992 and currently serves as its creative director. With a design philosophy drawing on African American culture and arts, Hood has established a distinctive approach to public space, designing to meet the needs of communities, while revealing and honoring a place’s layered histories. In three of his firm’s recent and current landscape projects across the US—Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing Park in Jacksonville, the Overtown Public Realm in Miami, and the overhaul of the Lincoln Center Plaza and ​​Damrosch Park in New York City—the renowned designer offers masterful case studies in narrating the past to address the present, and the role of urban landscape design in repairing the social and cultural fabric of American cities.