A member of our zoo group, Betsy is a landscape architect who draws on her abiding affection for animals, nature, math, and art to inform her work. As part of the team designing zoo exhibits, she relies on clients to provide the most minute details, because they know the nuances of the animals that are critical to the overall design.
Betsy uses this input from keepers, staff, and the zoo director to create safe and functional habitats for the animals, and meaningful experiences for the visitors. The zoo looks to us for big experiential ideas from intimate animal interactions to big picture planning. Her first zoo project? The Milwaukee Zoo elephant exhibit, where she worked on a project at her home zoo, a place she’d visited her whole life.
Never far from plants, whether at work or at home, Betsy’s go-to happy place is in her many gardens with her boys. She loves gardening in all seasons and gets seeds started as soon as she can each winter. She also likes hiking in the city with her family, and, of course, they get a zoo pass every year!
