In Remembrance: Katie Winter ’87, ’93MArch Died on March 11 2025

Katie Winter died on March 11, 2025, from multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow. James and their three daughters (Kai, Camilla, and Emma) celebrated Katie’s life at one of the schools in New York that Katie redesigned—the School of the Blessed Sacrament—on May 9, 2025, which would have been Katie’s 60th birthday. Katie’s Silliman roommates Betsy Nix and Pearlena Igbokwe were among those who spoke at the service. James used to visit Katie at the Fence Club where she and her undergraduate architecture classmates were inevitably working all night, or he and Katie would meet between Branford and Silliman and stand together on February nights on a particular grate above the steam tunnels on Cross Campus.

Katie ran her own practice, Katie Winter Architecture, primarily devoted to educational and nonprofit organizations in less well-resourced areas of New York City. She respected her clients' programmatic needs and financial constraints with the same high degree of passion and seriousness that she had for architectural design. She enjoyed construction more than anything and believed that engaging with contractors and those in the trades from the beginning, and throughout a project, improved design and served her clients' needs best. She worked to create a practice owned and staffed by women, and had hoped, if time allowed her, to devise ways to bring more women into the construction trades. From the moment she discovered architecture as an undergraduate, through her time at the Yale School of Architecture and into her career, she worked incredibly hard. She didn’t feel like she belonged to the tradition of the great architect dashing off a sketch surrounded by admirers, but focused instead on her clients' needs above her own vision. That said, she knew how to "sneak some architecture" into her projects, even for the schools with the fewest resources.

She and James were married 30 years. One of the reasons that she created her own practice and worked through the complexities of running all aspects of a small client-serving business was to have the flexibility to be present and deeply involved in the lives of her daughters.

She loved cartoons, Borromini churches, tulips, walking in Central Park or anywhere with her family or friends, and cake. She couldn't stop herself from excitedly answering any and every call from one of her daughters. Few people knew of her disease and few of those who did knew how serious it had become. And while she had to make time to treat her disease, she had no room in her life for talking about dying, let alone for dying itself. She had too much that she was doing and living for. She—and her family—will be forever grateful to Dr. Jeffrey Tepler who cared for her in New York as well as Dr. Kenneth Anderson at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and the nurses, doctors, and staff at New York Presbyterian–Weill Cornell.

—Submitted by the family.