Lizabeth Wardzinski has her PhD from North Carolina State University’s College of Design. She holds a bachelor’s degree in three-dimensional art from the University of Iowa and a Master of Architecture from Iowa State University. Wardzinski practiced architecture for six years before embarking on her Ph.D.. In her dissertation, “A Model for the World: Tennessee Valley Authority and Postwar Development,” she studies the impact of the TVA as a model of development and decentralization on city and regional planning throughout the American south and, later, in postwar regions of modernization.  

Wardzinski’s teaching research focus is on the Detroit neighborhood community of McDougall Hunt. The historic neighborhood was closely associated with the black entertainment district of Paradise Valley and business district of Black Bottom, both eradicated with the construction of I375 with the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. By looking at the impact of urban renewal 70 years later, Wardzinski and her students study ways that the design professions can rectify the discriminatory practices of our past with an explicitly anti-racist future of the built environment.