Meet the LA Urban Rangers
Nick Bauch, Ranger
Ranger Nick first honed his instincts for nature interpretation from the window seat of his grandfather’s 1982 Winnebago motor home, traveling the Great American West. His hard-core camping and mountain-biking days behind him (along with frostbite and broken collar bones), he now more typically continues his environmental adventuring from behind a different window, as a UCLA geographer just finishing his Ph.D. Nick's particular interest is how artists and geographers work together to describe and re-imagine the surface of the earth—and he enacts this interest also by teaching undergraduate courses that always include a hefty amount of fieldwork around the city. A native to the upper Midwest, his twice-yearly migrations to the Great White North have recently included a bicycle tour through Wisconsin, along with a foraging tour through Chicago for the best Polish sausages. Though still exotic to southern California, Nick has adapted surprisingly well, and has indefinitely shed his winter coat in exchange for watching the smog set in LA from the perch of his Koreatown home.
Sara Daleiden, Senior Ranger
Ranger Sara was raised in the agricultural outpost of Waukesha, Wisconsin, where her daily walks to school cultivated a deep interest in the pedestrian experience. After brief posts as an artist and organizer in the industrial port of Milwaukee and the civic spaces of Washington, D.C., she migrated to Los Angeles, where she creates public programs and related guides and tools that mobilize people to experience the complex connections between culture and landscape in their urban habitats. Her project Domestic Hollywood offers walking routes and games that highlight the extensive residential redevelopment in that mythic landscape, and her current Being Pedestrian collaboration with Ranger Sara Wookey and the city's Community Redevelopment Agency is a Downtown cultural tourism campaign that again emphasizes our most unusual form of locomotion in L.A. She also works as a cultural production consultant for clients including the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Suzanne Lacy, Freewaves, Marc Pally, and Cliff Garten Studio. She received her Master of Public Art Studies degree at USC, serves on the board of the L.A. Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and has taught at USC, Otis College of Art and Design, and Woodbury University.
Therese Kelly, Senior Ranger
Ranger Therese began her love affair with maps while stationed in New York, where she produced, edited, and designed numerous field guides of architectural fauna throughout the world for Princeton Architectural Press, as well as several compendia of historical maps of urban environs. Still navigating the intersections of landscape, urban design, architecture, and art, she charted course to Los Angeles in 1999 to work in the creation and care of architecture and the urban landscape. Through her work with architectural firms Moore Ruble Yudell and Rios Clementi Hale Studios, she has planned and designed several major urban spaces in the Los Angeles basin, including the Baldwin Hills, the Grand Avenue Civic Park, and Hollywood and Vine's MTA Plaza. She holds degrees in architecture from Princeton University and UCLA, and currently works off-duty as a freelance designer, editor, and artist, and is a frequent guest lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design. She loves winter in LA, when she can see snow-covered Mt. Baldy from her home in Santa Monica.
Ron Milam, Ranger
Ranger Ron grew up exploring America’s National Parks with his family. Raised in Los Angeles, he spent a considerable amount of time studying waves, dolphins and pelicans. He was lured as a college student to the green of the Pacific Northwest, where he became enchanted with bicycling as a way of exploring one’s local environment and making cities more sustainable. Returning to the semi-arid climes of Los Angeles, he taught bicycle safety for the LA School System, and subsequently served as founding executive director of the LA County Bicycle Coalition, which continues to advocate to make sure that our extensive trail system serves more than just large, fast, heavy carbon-emitting vehicles. In 2003, he took a brief post in New York City to work to create affordable human habitats and engaging educational environments. Since 2005, he’s consulted extensively with nonprofit organizations to help them raise money, make important decisions, and generally become more ferocious. He currently lives at the LA Eco-Village.
Jenny Price, Senior Ranger
Ranger Jenny grew up as a girl birder in St. Louis, Missouri near the Gateway Arch in the Mississippi River Valley, and has been stationed in the L.A. basin since 1998. In addition to her Urban Ranger duties, she works as a nonfiction writer, whose publications include Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA,” and the Green Me Up, JJ advice column on LA Observed, as well as articles in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, GOOD, Believer, Audubon, and Sunset. She leads frequent tours of the concrete L.A. River, which is one of her favorite places to hang out in nature in L.A. A Research Scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, she received her A.B. (biology) from Princeton University, where she became a world's expert on the white-winged trumpeters of the Amazon rain forest, and her Ph.D. in history from Yale University, where she emerged as a world's expert on the plastic pink flamingos of the North American suburban grasslands. She lives on Venice Beach.
Emily Scott, Senior Ranger
Ranger Emily received her first tent at age seven and never looked back. As a young adult, she spent nearly a decade roving the wilds of Utah and Alaska as a National Park Service Ranger, as curious about human ideas of nature as about the terrain she encountered. Eventually, she pitched camp in L.A. to pursue related questions in an academic habitat. In 2010, she completed a PhD in art history at UCLA with a dissertation, “Wasteland: American Landscapes in/and 1960s Art,” which examines the spaces and spatial politics engaged by early land-based artists. A firm believer in interdisciplinary cross-pollination, she is more often sighted in academic departments other than her own: she has taught contemporary art and theory to environmental scientists; organized events about intersections between art and geography; and published and lectured in a range of fields. She recently relocated to her new post in Zürich, Switzerland, where she is collaborating with artist Ursula Biemann and others on a multi-year, visual-research project about global resources as well as co-editing a book on contemporary land-based art. Her work has been supported by major awards/grants from the College Art Association, Graham Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Luce Foundation, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Switzer Foundation.
Ranger Specialists
Alex Amerri
John Arroyo
Lisa Anne Auerbach
Katie Bachler
Allison Danielle Behrstock
Amanda Evans
Walter Fears
Cathy Gudis
Maryam Hosseinzadeh
Chas Jackson
Melissa Kaplan
Kevin Michael Key
David Kipen
Ari Kletzky
Joe Linton
Alan Loomis
Michael Parker
Riccarlo Porter
Faith Purvey
Megan Sallabedra
Ronnie Walker
Sara Wookey
Other Specialists
Joe Bruns
Mark Escribano
Roman Jaster
Rachel Lindt
Harvey Opgenorth
Linda Pollack
KCET
Los Angeles Poverty Department