Jess Wendover

Jess Wendover is the Director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, a 21-year old program that is managed as a partnership of the American Architectural Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. In this capacity she has worked with over 45 American mayors and cities to help local leaders better understand issues of urban design so that they can advocate for better built environments in their own communities.

Jess also developed the first-ever international Mayors’ Institute on City Design in Warsaw, Poland, in May of this year. Over 25 Polish mayors participated in the urban design tour and two-day urban design symposium.

Before joining the Mayors’ Institute in 2006, Jess served as the Community Design Director at Urban Ecology in San Francisco, California, providing pro bono community planning and design assistance to low-income neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her primary project was the design and development of a community cultural center in East Oakland. The position at Urban Ecology was made possible by the Frederick P. Rose Architectural Fellowship.

Her previous work experience includes architecture, housing, and community development work in New York and Baltimore.

Jess earned a Master of Architecture and Master of City Planning from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Architecture from Columbia University. During her graduate work, Jess was awarded Berkeley’s Branner Traveling Fellowship, and visited 27 national capitals, researching public use of space in and around parliament buildings. She also received the Architecture Department’s Graduate Instructor of the Year Award.

Jess was a 2004-2005 Fellow of the Women’s Policy Institute of the Women’s Foundation of California, and has served on several non-profit boards and professional association committees. She currently serves as President of the Association for Community Design.