Kelly Comras, an award-winning landscape architect and a member of the State Bar of California, has become a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Comras was the first staff landscape architect for the National Park Service in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. While there, she developed an intense interest in park design and public land use that has continued to influence her work. She taught park planning and design at UCLA, receiving multiple awards for her project-based courses, and won a national ASLA award for her landscape design for Franklin Canyon.
Since 1986, Comras’s private practice has focused on community-based open space design, whereby she brings together stakeholders to achieve a common goal that relates to the study or use of land.
Her projects have included collaboration on a National Endowment for the Arts grant-funded study of historic gardens for the City of Pasadena; the stairways of Castellammare, a study funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust; and a dune restoration project at Will Rogers State Beach.
Comras also conducts research, publishes and lectures on topics relating to mid-century landscape design. Her latest book, the biography “Ruth Shellhorn,” was published by University of Georgia Press.
In addition to serving on the Palisades Design Review Board, Comras is an alternate Area Representative on the Community Council. She and her husband, Mike Lofchie, a political science professor at UCLA since 1964, have lived in Pacific Palisades for 31 years. Their son, Hudson, 27, a graduate of UC Davis, is Senior Manager, Client Operations, for Tray, located in Santa Monica.
You must be logged in to post a comment.