Melanie Winter, who dedicated much of her life to reimagining the Los Angeles River as a natural asset, has died. She was 67.

Winter worked persistently for nearly three decades to spread her alternative vision for the river and its watershed, calling for “unbuilding” where feasible, removing concrete and reactivating stretches of natural floodplains where the river could spread out.

Leading her nonprofit group the River Project, she championed efforts to embrace nature along the river, saying that allowing space for a meandering waterway lined with riparian forests would help recharge groundwater, reduce flood risks and allow a green oasis to flourish in the heart of Los Angeles.

She developed ambitious plans for rewilding parts of the river channel and nearby areas, and helped spearhead new riverfront parks as well as neighborhood “urban acupuncture” projects that replaced asphalt with permeable paving, allowing rainwater to percolate underground instead of running in concrete channels to the ocean.

Melanie Winter and her dog, Maisie, look over the L.A. River near the Sepulveda Basin.

“She was a voice for nature and a voice for the river,” said Rita Kampalath, L.A. County’s chief sustainability officer and a longtime friend of Winter’s. “She had such strength of her convictions, and she was so clear-eyed in the vision that she wanted to push forward. And I think that inspired a lot of people.”

Winter had lung cancer but continued working and attending local water meetings even as her health declined. She died Tuesday night at a Los Angeles hospital where friends had been visiting to spend a little last time together.

“I think what always drove her was the sense of, it was a river that had been contained in concrete … and that nature-based solutions could do a better job,” said Conner Everts, a friend and leader of the Southern California Watershed Alliance. “Her goal was to re-create a natural meandering river, with the ability to recharge into the [San Fernando] Valley and restore nature, as much as possible.”

Winter was born in 1958 and grew up in the Valley.

She was a talented dancer, and at 17 moved to New York City to start a career as a dancer and actor. She performed in Broadway shows and several Hollywood films, and also found work as a photographer, making black-and-white portraits of actors including Bruce Willis, Helen Hunt and Val Kilmer.

She left the city in 1991 and moved back to L.A., where she gravitated toward other art forms and social activism.

In 1993, to raise awareness about breast cancer, she made plaster casts of hundreds of women’s torsos and placed them in a cemetery-like installation on a lawn.

Melanie Winter admires the lush surroundings during a canoe trip on the L.A. River in the Sepulveda Basin in 2024.

She organized a river cleanup for the group Friends of the Los Angeles River, and then a pivotal moment came in 1996 when she attended a meeting where she heard activist Dorothy Green eloquently describe how concrete channels had starved the life from waterways, and how the city could make room for the river once again. Green became her mentor.

Winter worked for a time as executive director of Friends of the Los Angeles River, then left to start the River Project in 2001.

She sued developers and the city to challenge a planned development by the river, and organized a community coalition to push for a new state park. In 2007, she and others celebrated the opening of Rio de Los Angeles State Park.

Winter spoke passionately about the need for a network of parks “along the backbone system of our waterways,” saying this can boost ecosystems, improve air quality and protect public health. The lush, shady vegetation along restored stretches of river, she said, can provide natural cooling, helping the city become more resilient to climate change.

“I want to reverse-engineer us to a better future,” Winter said in an interview in 2024. “It would be a living river instead of a concrete river.”

At Rio de Los Angeles State Park, Melanie Winter sits on a bench designed by local artists to commemorate the park’s founding.

Winter was steadfast and uncompromising as she faced resistance from engineers and local officials who preferred traditional hard-infrastructure approaches.

“Engineers just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that nature can do it cheaper, better, easier than they can,” she said. “If you want a livable Los Angeles, then I fully believe that flipping the script on how we treat our waterways is central to it all.”

Three years ago, her group published a study outlining a proposal to restore the river and its tributaries in the Sepulveda Basin and transform the area into the “green heart” of the Valley, reducing the size of three golf courses and opening wide corridors where the river and creeks would spread out in the floodplains.

Winter was disappointed when the city released a plan for the area that she said failed to prioritize restoration.

“Even though she met with so much resistance over the years, she didn’t lose her optimism and her strong desire to make positive change,” said Melissa von Mayrhauser, a doctoral student at UC Berkeley who interviewed Winter for her research and became a friend. “I’m inspired by her vision, and I have brought that into my research, and I plan to continue working on a career in river restoration.”

She said Winter’s legacy includes not only the parks and neighborhood projects she completed, but also vital plans and concepts that can still be adopted throughout the watershed, and along other rivers.

“Thanks to Melanie, there are so many more people imagining a living L.A. River than ever before,” she said.

Melanie Winter leaves the site of a shuttered quarry with her dog, Maisie, in 2024. She supported a proposal to converttwoold gravel quarry pits into giant reservoirs where storm runoff could be routed to recharge the aquifer and reduce flood dangers downstream.

Near Winter’s home in Studio City sits a small riverside park shaded by cottonwood trees, where the native plants attract hummingbirds. There is a bench shaped like a butterfly, a retaining wall with a snake sculpture, and a green metal gate with an arch in the form of a giant toad.

In the early 2000s, Winter started envisioning the park, called Valleyheart Greenway, and invited a group of fourth- and fifth-grade students to design the garden landscape.

When the park opened in 2004, Winter said it wasn’t just about planting the garden, but also about instilling in the children a connection to their river.

Learning about the river, she said, created a group of “children with a fierce sense of place and a fierce determination to protect what’s left and to bring back as much as we can.”