Studio Zewde

Studio Zewde | Landscape design for Graffiti Pier and the Port Richmond Waterfront in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Image courtesy Studio Zewde

The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices program spotlights North American architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who have significant bodies of realized work and the potential to influence their field.

Studio Zewde won a 2021 award.

Sara Zewde is the founding principal of Studio Zewde, a landscape architecture, urban design, and public art practice based in New York City. Underlying her multidisciplinary design team’s work is the belief that narratives of people and place can serve as a guide towards shaping landscapes and materials into unique environments that resonate with those they serve. To this end, the firm endeavors to investigate each site’s cultural and ecological context to create meaningful, carefully detailed, enduring places.

Projects include:

Zewde was named a US Artist Fellow in 2020, a Dumbarton Oaks Mellon Fellow in 2019, and a Landscape Architecture Foundation National Olmsted Scholar in 2014. 

She received a bachelor’s degree in sociology and statistics from Boston University, a master’s degree in city planning and urban design from MIT, and a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard University, where she serves as an assistant professor of practice in landscape architecture.

Projects