Dorothy May Anderson was born in 1903 in Colville, Washington. She was one of only two students to graduate from the landscape architecture program at the State College of Washington in 1926. After working in Seattle for several years under Fred Cole, an English landscape architect, in 1929 Anderson returned to school to study at the Cambridge School of Art and Landscape Architecture. At that time, the Cambridge School was the best landscape and architecture school for women in the country. Financial difficulty forced Anderson to intersperse terms with landscaping work with Ellen Shipman and Louise Payson in New York, but she graduated in 1933 with her thesis "A School of Horticulture for Women".
In 1933, she was hired as landscape design and planting design teacher at the Lowthorpe School in Groton Massachusetts and later became the co-director of the school. In 1935, Anderson was invited to teach and redesign the grounds of Smith College. In 1943, Anderson left Smith to help in the war effort, working for the OSS Cartography Division until the end of the war. With few opportunities available in the field of landscaping architecture after the war, Anderson continued to work for the OSS, State Department, and Foreign Services in Cairo and Paris. In 1954, she joined the CIA doing similar cartographic work in the United States.
In 1966, Anderson retired from her position in the CIA as editor-in-chief of geographic reports. In retirement, Anderson remained professionally active, doing freelance writing and editing. In 1980, she published Women, Design and the Cambridge School: A History of the Smith College Graduate School of Landscape Architecture and Architecture in Cambridge. She passed away in 1993 at the age of 90.
From the guide to the Dorothy May Anderson Papers RG 42., 1930 - 1993, (Smith College Archives)
