Bio
Wortham-Galvin believes architecture is about people, not buildings. She has spent her distinguished career addressing the complexities and promises of urban design and how it can relate to people and places left out of the traditional design and development decisions.
Wortham-Galvin’s research confronts the challenges created by humanity’s migration into cities. Climate change, for instance, has made the use, containment and placement of water particularly critical. Also, equity issues affect everything from access to housing, schools, parks, libraries, safe streets, and more.
Her work on sustainability and stewardship has taken on even greater import in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent national unrest. She works with local and national communities on issues of equity and resilience in managing change in rural, suburban and urban places, emphasizing cultural sustainability and designing cities of the future through an inclusionary process.
As director of Resilient Urban Design, a graduate program in the School of Architecture located at the Clemson Design Center in Charleston, Wortham-Galvin prepares her students to be leaders in addressing the complexities of growing metropolitan regions.
For her work, the Daily Journal of Commerce named her one of Oregon’s Women of Vision for 2015. She received the 2009 Outstanding Project of the Year Award from the Chesapeake County Heritage Area Program for work on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with her former nonprofit Urban Dialogues.
As a member of the Maryland Urban Research Studio, she helped lead the team in their award-winning competition entry “Ground/Works” for The History’s Channel’s The City of the Future Challenge. She has published in journals such as Footprint, Architecture and Culture, Places, JAE, Powerlines, GAM, Dialectic, and the International Journal of Interior Architecture. She is also the lead editor of the book series, “Sustainable Solutions” (Greenleaf 2016).
Wortham-Galvin was named a fellow to the National Society of Collegiate Scholarship, a fellow for the Institute of Small Town Studies, cited in Who’s Who in Teaching, and awarded the Martin Fellow for Sustainability and the Alpha Rho Chi Medal. She recently had her course selected as one of five for the 2030 Curriculum Project that honors innovative models for transforming the way sustainable design is taught
