Andrea Roberts

Andrea Roberts is an associate professor of urban and environmental planning and Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. In 2014, she founded The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, the vehicle through which she mentors and trains future planners, preservationists, scholars, students, and community-based researchers to challenge freedom colony invisibility through heritage conservation. She is currently writing a book, Never Sell the Land, about her experiences identifying Black planning and historic preservation practices that sustain cultural resilience within freedom colonies for the University of Texas Press.

Roberts was co-project director of the 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities’ Summer Institute, “Towards a People’s History of Landscape — Part 1: Black & Indigenous Histories of the Nation’s Capital,” and was Visiting Garden and Landscape Studies Scholar at Dumbarton Oaks in spring 2023. She is a member of the Experts Advisory Committee for the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.