Karen LeGresley Hamre obtained her Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of Toronto in 1979. She worked in the field of landscape architecture in Germany and Ontario before moving to Calgary in 1982. She was accepted as a member of the AALA in 1983. That same year, she moved to Yellowknife. She was a founding member of the NWTALA (1991), which has been her main component since. She has been the NWTALA treasurer since its inception, and served on the CSLA Board as well. Karen joined the LACF Board in 2013 and has been the Foundation’s secretary since 2015.
Karen’s career has been a combination of public (Ministry of Natural Resources, ON and Department of Economic Development and Tourism, NWT) and private (Buero Isterling, Hamburg; Brian Dodds and Associates, Calgary). She started Avens Associates Ltd. in 1985, and continued to own and operate the company since then. Karen has worked in many Nunavut communities and most NWT communities. Her work includes park and interpretive planning and design, community tourism projects, and urban design. She was the landscape architect for Yellowknife’s Government of Canada building, the first LEED certified building in the NWT. Much of her work includes work with First Nations, Metis and Inuit.
Karen was also a member of the Gwich’in Land Use Planning Board, which established the first tri-partite approved regional land use plan in the NWT.
