Diana Balmori

She died in her sleep on November 14, 2016, at the age of 84.

In 2014, Balmori's firm, Balmori Associates, moved into a new space in Soho, New York City. Balmori lived and worked in New York City.

In 2011 she was named a fellow of the American Society of American Landscape Architects.

Besides an extensive list of built works during her career, Balmori also influenced public and national policy on the built environment. Her positions included: a member of the Allston Development Group at Harvard University, a member of the Board of The Van Alen Institute, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation for the World Trade Center Site, and as a Committee Member for the Comprehensive Design Plan for the White House. Balmori was honored by institutions including the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of Architects. In 2006, Balmori was appointed a Senior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC.; she served two terms on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Balmori held the Davenport Chair of Architectural Design for the Spring 2004 at the Yale School of Architecture and was the William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor of Architectural Design in the Fall 2008 at the Yale School of Architecture and she also taught in the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She was a member of the American Historical Association, and the American Society of Landscape Architects. She served as a Committee Member for the Comprehensive Design Landscape Plan for the White House in 1999.

As the principal landscape designer at Balmori Associates, she was the lead on many innovative projects. She designed the Master Plan for the Abandiobarra District in Bilbao, Spain, where her landscape designs run alongside the Nervion River and adjacent to the building of the Guggenheim Bilbao. She realized the concept of Robert Smithson for a floating island around New York City in 2005. Out of 36 submissions from 9 countries, Balmori Associates (New York) with StudioMDA, Knippers Helbig Inc., David Skelly, CITA, Bluegreen, John A. Martin & Associates, and David Langdon, was selected as one of five finalists in the ARC International Wildlife Crossing Infrastructure Design Competition, a competition sponsored by ARC Solutions, which challenged competitors to propose design concepts for a wildlife crossing over US Interstate 70 (I-70), near Denver, Colorado.

After graduation, she moved to the East Coast to start her professional and academic work. Balmori accepted a teaching position at the State University of New York at Oswego and held undergraduate seminars in Landscape History at Yale School of Architecture. Balmori continued her own education, studying landscape architecture at Radcliffe College, until she was made partner at Cesar Pelli Associates, where she also founded their in-house Landscape Architecture department. She continued to work as a partner at CPA before leaving in 1990 to start her own firm, Balmori Associates.

She contributed to numerous publications, including coauthoring the books Beatrix Farrand, American Landscapes: Garden and Campus Designs(1985), Redesigning the American Lawn (1993) and Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture (2011).

She graduated from high school at the age of 16 and studied at the Architecture School at the National University of Tucumán in Argentina, in the undergraduate program. It was there she met her future husband, César Pelli, and the two of them emigrated to the United States in 1952. Balmori continued her education at the University of California, Los Angeles, earning her PhD in urban history. Balmori and Pelli had two children: Denis, a neurobiologist and professor of psychology and neural science at New York University and Rafael Pelli, who went on to become a well-known architect at his father's firm, Cear Pelli Associates. The couple resided in an apartment in the San Remo on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Diana Balmori Ling (June 4, 1932 – November 14, 2016) was a landscape and urban designer. She was the founder of the landscape design firm Balmori Associates.