Kate Orff  Kate Orff, RLA, FASLA, is the founding principal of SCAPE, a design-driven landscape architecture and urban design studio based in New York. She also is the director the Urban Design Program (MSAUD) at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and co-director of the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes. Orff is the first landscape architect to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Orff's work focuses on retooling the practice of landscape architecture relative to uncertainty of climate change and fostering social life which she has explored through publications, activism, research, and projects. She is known for leading complex, creative, and collaborative work processes that advance broad environmental and social prerogatives. She has designed projects across the United States and internationally. She lectures widely in the U.S. and abroad on the topic of urban landscape and new paradigms of thinking, collaborating and designing for the Anthropocene Era. Orff is also listed on TED talks, the Architectural League NY, Aperture Foundation, and WNYC. Orff also teaches interdisciplinary seminars and design studios at Columbia University. She was listed first by "Elle Magazine" in 2011 as one of nine women involved as "fixers" for mankind. She is the director of the Urban Design Program at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is founder and co-director of the Urban Landscape Lab. According to the Urban Landscape Lab biographical information her office, SCAPE, has won local and national design awards. She was named a Dwell Magazine ‘Design Leader’ and H&G's 50 For the Future of Design. Orff grew up in a once-gated suburban community in Crofton, Maryland, to which she has been designed for the use of cars and created on the steadfast idea that oil was what kept modern settlements relevant. During Orff's summers of high school, she worked an odd string of jobs; for one summer, she as a fishmonger and another she worked at a plant nursery. It was at the plant nursery that she learned about plants and began to enjoy the activity of gardening. Orff attended the University of Virginia in the undergraduate program of Political and Social Thought which was founded by Richard Rorty. The program offered Orff freedom in choosing the path that she wanted to take within her studies. This led to her looking at women's studies, environmental sciences, sculpture, forest ecology which intertwined the arts and science in the University of Virginia curriculum.