Matté Fresca

A Western woman through and through, Planning and Landscape Architecture Intern Matté Fresca loves going country swing dancing and two-stepping, exploring horse handling and riding, and even spent a semester at Texas A&M as an “Aggie Wine Wrangler,” a position where she was a teaching assistant for a wine class. In the role, she donned cowgirl attire once a week to help serve wine and food pairings to more than 600 students while supporting course instruction and producing social media content. Her three years at Texas A&M have been an opportunity for her to dive deep into multiple interests. Besides wine and dance, she’s also gotten into pickleball, hosted her own radio show called “Agua Fresca,” and co-founded the NAMLA student chapter, a space for minority students to connect, network, find moments of levity, and hear from diverse speakers focused on variety of topics such as designing public spaces to be more accessible for deaf and hard of hearing users from Landscape Designer, Alexa Vaughn, creator and curator of DeafScape.

Matté was drawn to the field of landscape architecture because of how it combines artistry with environmental science. As a child she was fixated on maps, meteorology, various mythologies and lore, geology, geography, Legos, life simulation games, flora and fauna, and how cities are built. Landscape architecture has been a field of study where her natural curiosity has been able to flourish. She is currently most interested in the intersection between landscape and water, whether that be mitigating flooding risks or utilizing scarce resources in arid environments.