Ana Gelabert-Sanchez

Ana Gelabert-Sanchez is Principal of Gelabert-Sanchez LLC, a Planning and Design consulting firm that serves clients in the public and private sectors.

She has over 25 years of experience in the planning field including serving as planning director for the City of Miami from 1998 to 2010. In that position, she led the Miami 21 initiative, a form-based zoning code that takes a holistic approach to land use and urban planning to make Miami a more sustainable, pedestrian-friendly and better-planned city. As a result of this work, Miami was the first major U.S. city to adopt a form-based zoning citywide code. Miami 21 won numerous awards, including the American Planning Association National Planning Excellence Award for Best Practice in 2011.

Gelabert-Sanchez was named Top Public Official of the year for 2010 by Governing magazine and received the CNU Groves Award on Leadership and Vision in 2011. In 2010, she was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University.

Gelabert-Sanchez holds a Bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She has also worked as an Urban Planning and Design Critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

She is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners and site visitor pool of the Planning Accreditation Board.