2025 Fellows: Kaia Nesbitt, FASLA, Colorado Chapter

HDR, Denver, CO
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Kaia Nesbitt is an award-winning landscape architect who harnesses multidisciplinary teams to deliver transformative community, campus, and urban redevelopment projects that advance city resiliency, green infrastructure, and healthy, sustainable communities. She is energized by the challenge of solving multiple problems simultaneously and posits that landscape architects-with their distinctly broad understanding of the public realm, ecology, and infrastructure-are natural leaders and connectors who can fulfill that aspiration. Kaia has built a robust urban design, planning, and landscape architecture practice within a large, global AE firm by coalescing diverse disciplines and design perspectives when working on both public- and private-sector projects. During her 20-year career, which began at EDAW, Kaia's portfolio of award-winning, human-centered projects demonstrates her ability to successfully lead and deliver creative placemaking at multiple scales. In her many leadership roles at HDR, Kaia has influenced and expanded urban design and landscape architecture teams into a variety of market areas, including health-oriented development, parks as infrastructure, net zero community development, and the intersection of mobility and land use. Kaia's vision for the profession often finds her reaching "across the aisle" to allied professional organizations, forging relationships, building connections, and sharing knowledge. She is currently the Colorado District Council Chair for the Urban Land Institute-the first landscape architect to ever serve in that role-which gives her a forum for sharing the value that landscape architects bring to development. Whether it's through the projects she leads, the initiatives she guides, or the networks she has cultivated, her message is consistent and clear: landscape architects are integral to designing a just and equitable world.