I believe that every project is an opportunity to create a movement. To inspire this momentum, we must be one with the community, and together, go beyond the bare minimum.

Sierra Bainbridge, RLA

Senior Principal and Managing Director
Boston, MA, USA

As the Senior Principal leading many of MASS’s most complex and transformative memorial, health, and conservation projects, Sierra stewards cross-disciplinary work to further a healthful and just future through design. With a background blending landscape, architecture, ecology, and regional planning, she is committed to seeking comprehensive design approaches that will allow people to respond more radically to climate change and create an abundant future for all species.

Over the past 20 years, Sierra has worked to transform the profession to serve the needs of the many over the few, constantly seeking methods to utilize design to meet the greatest needs of communities balancing beauty, context, and impact. These experiments began at field operations, learning the various techniques of rewilding and restoration through projects like The High Line in NYC and Fresh Kills on Staten Island, and continued at MASS on award-winning projects such as The Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA) and the Ellen Degeneres Campus for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, leading to numerous awards for the firm including the 2023 Landezine Award of Excellence, the 2023 BSLA Award of Excellence in Design, the 2022 AIA Firm of the Year, the 2021 AIA Collaborative Achievement Award, the 2020 ASLA Award for Analysis & Planning and the National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. 

Sierra seeks to evolve the profession through education and service. She is the recipient of the prestigious Berkeley Rupp Prize in 2023-25 for career achievement and in support of furthering her current research on biodiversity & rewilding and has been on the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Board of Directors since 2019, as well as on the Executive Committee as the VP of Communications in 2022-23.  

Outside of MASS, Sierra is a creative educator. She has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Stuart Chan School of Design at UPenn, the Boston Architecture Center, and the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), where she served as Head of the Architecture Department. She contributed to developing the curriculum at KIST, the African Design Center, and the Rwanda Institute of Conservation Agriculture. 

She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture and a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in Architectural History from Smith College.