Founding Principal of SCAPE
Kate Orff has built a life where design, community, and environment entwine with conviction. As the founding principal and partner at SCAPE, a studio she launched from her New York apartment in the early 2000s, she turned landscape architecture into a tool for change, steadily reshaping cities, coastlines, and public imagination. Raised in suburban Maryland, Kate found early inspiration through odd jobs, from caring for plants in a nursery to selling fish, that introduced her to the raw elements of life and the fragile ties between nature and culture. Her undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia embraced political thought, environmental science, sculpture, and forest ecology.