Mía Guttfreund was born in the first half of the 1950s in San Salvador, capital of El Salvador. She is the daughter of German Jewish refugees who fled to Latin America because of Nazi persecution. Her parents did not have high school qualifications, but her father was able to find success in the export business. Her childhood would inspire her work later in life. She would later say that "nature was always present and palpable" and that she "was always aware of it and it was always on [her] mind." She also recalled how DDT had damaged coastal ecosystems and was impacted when experts worked to help reverse the damage.[4] In the late 1970s, El Salvador was facing worsening political conflicts and Lehrer's father urged her to leave the country and complete her undergraduate studies in the United States.[1]
Having immigrated to the United States, she went to Tufts University near Boston. She intended studying international relations or urban planning, and her senior thesis examined the impact that dams in El Salvador had had on communities and habitats. While attending a lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, she found an exhibition of Frederick Law Olmsted's landscape drawings and after added encouragement from landscape architect Peter Walker, decided to go on to study landscape architecture. She completed her degree at Tufts and applied to the landscape design program at Harvard;[4] There, she studied under Peter Walker and was influenced by the work of Ian McHarg and Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.[1]
She met her husband, Los Angeles architect Michael B. Lehrer, at Harvard; after graduating, the couple relocated to Southern California and eventually settled in Los Angeles. Mia ran a private studio out of her home focused on residential landscape design.[4] By the late 1980s, her interest in environmental issues and activist work as well as tree planting projects around the neighborhood connected her with Andy Lipkis, founder of TreePeople, who introduced her to sessions where government officials, engineers and activists were involved. These sessions led her to making the public realm a focus of her professional work rather than just her private work. During this time, she formalized her office and established a professional studio, Mia Lehrer + Associates, in 1995;[5] this studio has evolved into Studio-MLA and now includes an office in San Francisco.[1]
Lehrer was appointed to the Board of Water and Power Commissioners by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on September 24, 2020, and was confirmed by the Council on October 21, 2020, for a term lasting until June 30, 2024.[13]
In 2021, Lehrer's Studio-MLA was selected to design the new Community Park as part of the Fair Park Master Plan in Dallas, Texas in partnership with Studio Outside of Dallas, architect Allison Grace Williams and Dallas architects buildingcommunityWORKSHOP as the core design team.[14]
By 2022, Lehler designed the gardens of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, scheduled to open in 2025.[15]
2021 Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards, Landscape Architecture, Mia Lehrer [17]
Merit Award for Institutional Design from the American Society of Landscape Architects, Southern California Chapter - for their design of the North Campus Garden at the Natural History Museum[18]
