Kanchan Wali-Richardson | Landscape Designer
she/her
Kanchan is a landscape systems thinker/ designer/ artist/ steward/ and plant nerd most in her skin when she’s outside. She has a background in a range of trainings and practices, all coming from the same call to act responsibly and with love towards the utterly wonderful mystery of life in all its forms.
She has a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design, a bachelor’s in fine art from Cooper Union and was a Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Grant recipient to India (where her mother’s side of the family comes from).
Her experience centers on using landscape design, regenerative land / marine management planning, and visual storytelling in close collaboration with communities and business owners to rebuild bioregional economies and cultures of land care. She came to Watershed Progressive after several years working in Fiji Islands with indigenous community co-ops on regenerative agriculture, agro-forestry, mariculture and circular economy systems focused on restoring coral reef ecosystems and the watersheds that flow into them.
Before Fiji she worked in California on drought and fire resilient landscape design, community focused urban design, arid landscape water systems, and has an (almost obsessive) love of California plant communities, wild food ecology, and ideas for supporting stronger collective land stewardship and systemic change.