Faculty Profile
Kate Chesebrough
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Landscape Architecture
Landscape Architecture
Visiting Assistant Professor
Kate Chesebrough is a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY-ESF where she teaches undergraduate and graduate design studios, planting design, and professional practice courses. She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from Cornell University and is a licensed Landscape Architect in New York State.
In her teaching and design, Kate promotes the notion of landscapes holding multiple truths. Her background in an arts environment informs a fundamental connection to powerful spatial and material experiences in landscape. Kate is a passionate advocate for trees, public spaces, and vibrant communities. She promotes dialogue through drawing and engages diverse expertise while preparing context-sensitive design responses to complex conditions and to realize ambitious goals.
Her studio work has focused on tree, soil, and water dynamics, often working between concepts of care and maintenance, cultural and material legacies, systems and sites, vulnerability and values. A hands-on, hybrid analog and digital approach to drawing and fieldwork keeps students engaged in working with spatial realities and potentials while continuously reflecting on broader implications of design.
For over 6 years Kate was an Associate, Project Manager, and Landscape Architect at a small, dynamic landscape architecture and planning firm in Ithaca, NY leading large public and private projects. Areas of focus include site analysis and design development for urban sites at a range of scales including neighborhoods, infill, plazas, streetscapes, courtyards, parks, green infrastructure, and multi-modal circulation; stakeholder outreach and engagement; community master plans; zoning and re-zoning processes; client and project team point of contact; and coordinating environmental and municipal approvals. She continues to consult independently.
Kate's design research thesis promotes native trees and youth-led community organizations as central to an urban forestry 'commons' in riparian, informal settlement landscapes in Nairobi, Kenya, undertaken as an Urban Forestry Research Fellow at CIFOR-ICRAF (World Agroforestry). She presented during the World Forum on Urban Forestry in 2023, Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture in 2024, and published an article in an environmental magazine based in Nairobi.
At Cornell, Kate was a teaching and research assistant for numerous undergraduate and graduate design studios, plant identification and design courses, and interdisciplinary workshops. Her work is featured in a Cornell CALS Student Spotlight ‘Field Notes’ 2024 article.
Kate has been recognized as a two-time national Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar, as a Finalist ('16) and Scholar ('24). She was named the Cornell CALS Teaching Assistant of the Year and granted the Dreer Travel Award and the Academic Excellence Scholarship.
While completing her BLA at SUNY-ESF, Kate led the Red Cup Project, coordinating volunteers to pick up 17,500+ cups off of neighborhood streets to create pop-up public art. She spent her off-campus semester in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil as an artist in residence at Vik Muniz Studio, studying dynamics of an arts school in a favela for her undergraduate capstone.
Kate is an active academic critic, volunteer with NY-Upstate ASLA and US-El Salvador Sister Cities, avid outdoorsperson, gardener, and life-long resident of upstate New York.