About

Emma’s work is driven by a joyful embrace of the design process – from site investigation to team collaboration, from sketch exploration to successful implementation. She’s a fierce advocate for place-specific design and team-built success. Emma’s projects find her interacting with complex networks of design and engineering professionals, local craftsmen, and regionally-sourced materials; Emma sees her role as steering a creative conversation with clients and properties – building unique landscapes that fit unique goals. Practicing primarily in Maine and focusing on residential landscapes, Emma believes deeply in the power of place-making: our ability to shape the spaces around us into crucibles for future meaning and memories.

In her first 10 years of professional practice, Emma honed her technical and managerial skills on large-scale environmental-, public-, and institutionally-focused projects throughout the US with Hargreaves Associates, and more intimately scaled regionally-sensitive and context-specific New England design with Richardson & Associates. In 2013 Emma formed Emma Kelly Landscape LLC as an exciting new outlet for her passion for the personal impact of design, and her recent work can be seen in publications such as Maine Home & Design and the Boston Globe Magazine. Even more recently, Emma launched ColLab, a collaborating laboratory of five independent, women-owned landscape architecture practices working on projects throughout the Northeast. As a founding principal of this groundbreaking new organization, Emma is eager to capture the synergy of working with stellar peers who can drive the creative focus of projects further, and support even more complex and far-reaching project needs.

Emma received her master’s degree in Landscape Architecture, with distinction, from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, as well as her undergraduate degree, with high honors, in the fields of Cultural Anthropology and Religion. She has shared her love of design and the design process through studio instructor, visiting critic, and design jury roles at design and horticultural programs from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design to Southern Maine Community College.

Education
Master of Landscape Architecture, with Distinction - Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA
Bachelor of Arts, Magna Cum Laude - Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, Cambridge, MA

Membership
COLLAB - Landscape Collective
American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA)
Boston Society of Landscape Architects (BSLA)