Kate Orff is the founder and design director of SCAPE, a design-driven landscape architecture and urban design studio based in New York. 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 listed on TED talks, the Architectural League NY, Aperture Foundation, and WNYC. Kate also teaches interdisciplinary seminars and design studios where she is the Associate Professor and Director of the Undergraduate Urban Landscape Lab at Columbia University. In 2017, Orff was 45 years old when she was the recipient of a "Genius Grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The grant was given to Orff for her designs in adaptive and resilient habitats and for reviving ecological systems. In 2013, Orff was named National Academician. Kate Orff has been the Vice President of the Architectural League of New York since 2010. In 2005, Orff was recognized as a Design Fellow in the New York City Audubon Society.

In 2011, Princeton Univeristy published Gateway, Visions for an Urban National Park by Kate Orff and in 2012, the Aperture Foundation published Petrochemical America, a book by Orff which won the National ALSA award in the communications category in 2013. Petrochemical America featured Richard Misrach's photography of the industrialized Mississippi River and visual narratives by SCAPE and Orff, herself.

Orff was educated at the University of Virginia and Harvard 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.

In 2012 Orff was named a United States Artists Fellow.

In 2014, Orff was recognized for her work designing the 103rd Street Community Garden, a winning site of Built by Women New York City, a competition launched by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation during the fall of 2014 to identify outstanding and diverse sites and spaces designed, engineered and built by women.

SCAPE has developed a design called "Oyster-tecture," which is supposed to create living architecture in shorelines while improving animal habitats. In 2014, SCAPE was recognized as the winner of the Rebuild By Design competition in order to preserve communities after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. SCAPE's winning project was a play off of Oyster-tecture called "Living Breakwaters" and was meant to reduce erosion on the shoreline of Brooklyn, New York. Living Breakwaters serves as an environmentally-friendly, natural oyster reef that should be able to filter up to millions of gallons of water every day. Living Breakwaters has won not only the Rebuild by Design competition, but also the Buckminster Fuller Challenge in 2014, the ACEC NY Engineering Excellence Award in 2015, and the National Achievement Award also in 2015. According to the SCAPE website, the project was due for construction in 2019.

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