Joanna Kennedy

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Joanna Kennedy, born Joanna Alicia Gore Ormsby on 22 July 1950 in London, is a British civil engineer and project manager. She studied at The Abbey School in Reading and Queen Anne’s School in Caversham, winning a scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. There she was one of just three women among more than a hundred engineering students and graduated with first-class honours in Engineering Science, winning the ICE Prize.

Kennedy joined Ove Arup & Partners in 1972. Her early projects included the M25 Runnymede Bridge and St Paul’s Thameslink station. She founded Arup’s project management practice in 1990, led its Europe operations in 2006, and became Global Leader for Programme and Project Management in 2010, a role she held until 2013. The practice won the APM Project Management Company of the Year in 2007 and 2012. She was a Trustee of the Ove Arup Foundation from 2010 to 2020.

Her project leadership at Arup included redevelopments at the Southbank Centre, the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, Hackney Empire, the Horniman Museum, and the remodelled King’s Cross St Pancras tube station. She was project director for the Francis Crick Institute (2008–2013) and for the Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre (2009–2013).

Kennedy has held many public and honorary roles. She has served as Vice-Chairman of the Port of London Authority, a Commissioner of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, a Trustee of the Science Museum, and a member of the Engineering Council. She has also been a Trustee of Cumberland Lodge and Poole Museum Foundation, and a Council member at the University of Southampton (1996–1999) and the Royal College of Art (2001–2016, chairing the Buildings & Estates Committee). She was commissioned as a Major in the Engineer and Logistic Staff Corps in 2004 and elected to the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers in 2005.

Kennedy is a patron of Women into Science and Engineering (WISE), a role she helped launch in 1984. From 2015 to 2023 she was a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, becoming deputy chair and chairing the Inspiring People redevelopment, which reopened in June 2023. The project was shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2024. She is married to Richard Kennedy (m. 1979) and they have two sons, one of whom is the musician Pearson Sound.

Honours include OBE and FREng, an Honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Salford (1997), Woman of the Year at the Atkins Inspire Awards (2007), First Woman of Engineering (CBI/Real Business Awards, 2013), and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art (2017).