MARIA DEBIJE COUNTS is based in Miami and specializes in urban landscapes. Her work seeks to expand the experiential range of landscapes as agents of well-being at the scale of the site. She was a 2018 Van Alen Grant awardee for her project, “Sonic City: Visualizing Spaces in Urban Places”. She is also a design educator and has previously taught at IIT, Clemson University, NYU, the City College of New York, and Penn State. She is a past Visiting Artist in Rome, a Rudy J. Favretti Fellow, and a member of the American Society of Landscape Architecture (ASLA). Counts’ experience in education includes serving as design critic and jury member at Florida International University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne, Parsons, and Yale University. She has been selected as a jury member for the 2020 WLA (World Landscape Architecture) awards program. Her student work has received two national ASLA honor awards in Communications and been published in three of the Representing Landscapes series books edited by Nadia Amoroso including Representing Landscapes: Analogue (2019), Representing Landscapes: Hybrid (2016) and Representing Landscapes: Digital (2015).

She is on the USGBC Board of South Florida and has previously served on the Board of CELA (Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture) as a Regional Director. Counts’ built work has been featured in international design festivals and exhibitions across the globe and been awarded national ASLA honor awards. She has been published in The Making of Place by John Dixon Hunt (2016) for her first built work at the Jardins de Métis in Quebec, Canada, Atlas of Landscape Architecture (2017) for the Beijing Expo Garden, and the Compendium of Landscape Architecture and Open Space (2018). Recent exhibitions of her professional work with Counts Studio include Crown Hall in Chicago, Illinois, the School of Architecture at Clemson University, and a feature in the Rosa Barba International Landscape Biennial.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design.