PRINCIPAL, ASLA, LEED AP
As the studio’s CEO and Managing Principal, Zoee Astrachan collaborates on all projects and directs office operations. Zoee is a licensed landscape architect in California, a LEED accredited professional with over twenty years of Landscape Architecture project design and management experience.
Zoee’s expertise is in the realm of urban landscapes, where her extensive civic design experience working with institutional clients, developers, and community-based organizations in the Bay Area has resulted in the design of numerous health care environments, streetscapes, institutional campuses, office building courtyards, and public gardens and parks. As a partner at IA she brings her critical design focus to work collaboratively on all of the firm’s projects including private residences, commercial buildings, civic structures, and larger scale multi-family, mixed-use typologies to create places with longevity and cultural significance.
Zoee’s perpetual interest in material and craft was manifested early in her career through works in hand bookbinding and photography. This work focused her attention on the interface between landscape and architecture, artifact and the natural word. Material and craft at the interface between architecture and landscape, geometry and ecology, continue to drive her interest and work in design.
Zoee has taught art and design at California College of the Arts and has been a visiting critic at McGill University and the University of California at Berkeley. Zoee earned her Master of Landscape Architecture from the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, preceded by a Bachelor of Arts in Design of the Environment achieved at the University of Pennsylvania.
Outside the office, Zoee is an avid marathon runner, and in a former life was a practicing equestrian competitor. She spent her youth growing up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and has lived in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco for 20 years.