Trudi Sandmeier is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Director of Graduate Programs in Heritage Conservation, and Professor of Practice at the USC School of Architecture. She has decades of experience in heritage conservation advocacy, education, and leadership. A respected leader and mentor, Sandmeier has a passion for helping people find and pursue their path in this highly varied, ever-changing field.
Sandmeier began teaching at USC in 2003 and joined the faculty full time in 2011. She served as Heritage Conservation program director from 2011 to 2022, returning to the position in 2023. She always looks to the future of the field, with innovations to the program including:
- Changing the name of the program from Historic Preservation to Heritage Conservation—a global term that more accurately reflects the work within the field, as well as the continuum of conservation from the natural environment to built and intangible heritage.
- Introducing dual degree master’s programs with Heritage Conservation and Urban Planning, Landscape Architecture + Urbanism, and Building Science.
- Co-creating the award-winning podcast Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation, which interviews graduate students and alumni about their work and career paths. See her talk about the podcast, and why it’s so important to hear student voices, on “Save As: Unplugged.”
See her keynote address, “Thinking Ahead,” for the Historic Preservation Planning Alumni’s 2022 symposium at her alma mater, Cornell University.
Sandmeier served on the review committee for the citywide SurveyLA; co-directed the 2019 Preserving the Recent Past 3 conference, and co-edited (with fellow faculty member Vinayak Bharne) the 2019 Routledge Companion to Global Heritage Conservation.
She previously worked for the Los Angeles Conservancy, one of the nation’s leading preservation advocacy and education nonprofits. She held three positions: Preservation Advocate, Broadway Initiative Coordinator, and Director of Education. In these various roles, she led efforts to conserve, reuse, and rehabilitate historic places; provided technical assistance to developers, property owners, and community members; marketed, advised, and ran façade grant programs for historic buildings in downtown Los Angeles; and merged advocacy with education in public programs on everything from spectacular (and vernacular) homes to the bridges of the Los Angeles River.
Sandmeier is the co-founder, past president, and board member of the Will Rogers Ranch Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the ongoing restoration, rehabilitation, and preservation of Will Rogers State Historic Park. She serves on the boards of the California Preservation Foundation, Historic Preservation Education Foundation, and Southern California chapter of Docomomo US. She also serves as an advisor to Friends of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles (FORT: LA).
She was also just named the 2025 commencement speaker for the USC School of Architecture.
On being chosen as the School of Architecture Commencement Speaker:
“The honor of learning from our students and mentoring them as they develop into the next generation of conservation leadership is a huge privilege – every day, I learn something new about our field and our work through my teaching,“
Wallpaper* Magazine Interview
How do we steward the past into the future? As a conservationist and director of the graduate programs in heritage conservation at USC School of Architecture, the question is often on the mind of Trudi Sandmeier. A few weeks after the fires in Los Angeles indiscriminately engulfed neighbourhoods in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, it’s become an important and regular refrain. The fires destroyed individual structures, some designated as historically or architecturally important, and tore a rent in the cultural fabric of the city. In their aftermath, the ways that we give meaning to the buildings and places around us have changed.