Rosalie Genevro

Rosalie Genevro is an architectural historian and urbanist who has led the Architectural League as Executive Director since 1985, pursuing the Leagueʼs mission of nurturing excellence and stimulating discussion and debate on issues in architecture, design and urbanism. The League’s programs present the work of many of the world’s best-known architects and emerging talents, and create opportunities for investigation and innovation in the built environment.

Engaging a wide range of public forums and platforms, Ms. Genevro has organized design studies, directed exhibitions, initiated digital publications, conceived and edited print publications, and guided the creation of live public events including lectures, panels, conferences, symposia, and roundtable discussions. The New York Cityfocused design studies she has directed include “Vacant Lots,” on affordable infill housing for small sites, “New Schools for New York,” on design and development strategies to create small public schools, “The Productive Park,” on parks and the water supply, “Envisioning East New York,” and “Arverne: Housing on the Edge.” Digital projects include worldviewcities.org, which presents reports by local young architects on out-of-the mainstream cities around the world, and urbanomnibus.net, a publication that defines and enriches the culture of citymaking through a focus on good ideas for cities, tried and tested in the five boroughs of New York. She has directed the creation of major traveling exhibitions, including “Renzo Piano Building Workshop: Selected Projects,” “Ten Shades of Green: Architecture and the Natural World” and “Urban Life: Housing in the Contemporary City.” She conceived and directs the ongoing, multiformat League project “The Five Thousand Pound Life: Architecture, Climate Change, and our Economic Future.”

Ms. Genevro has served as a peer reviewer for the NYC Departments of Design and Construction, City Planning, Cultural Affairs and Parks and Recreation, a grant review panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, and a critic and juror for many architecture school juries and other prize competitions. She is a member of the New York Committee of the Regional Plan Association and served as a member of the executive committee for Ideas City, a biannual festival of new ideas for cities organized by the New Museum and a consortium of downtown cultural organizations. Ms. Genevro received a 2015 Arts and Letters Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She studied history and architectural history at Occidental College and Cornell University.