Maria Mathilde

Founder & Design Director

Maria is the Founder and Design Director of Fortuna Leaf, a Miami-based high-end luxury indoor/outdoor garden design office. She is an artist, designer, researcher, educator and author in urban planning and design, representation and landscape architecture. Maria grew up in the small town of Kinderhook in upstate New York and comes from a Dutch, German and Italian background. Her work seeks to expand the experiential range of landscapes as agents of well-being at the scale of the site. She often uses vibrant colors, exciting textures, and form to call attention to how we sense our environments in her work. Maria is a past Van Alen Institute Grant recipient for her project, “Sonic City: Visualizing Spaces in Urban Places” that explores interpreting the acoustics of urban gardens and parks and expressing them visually. She is a past Visiting Artist of the American Academy in Rome, Italy and a Rudy J. Favretti Fellow (Garden Club of America, Virginia Chapter), and a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA).

Maria believes quality design is not an accident and enjoys training and educating future leaders in the profession through her teaching at local Universities and with her not-for-profit Landscape Skills Inc. She is currently Adjunct Professor at Florida International University (FIU) where she has been teaching foundations through advanced courses on design principles, planting, theory, computer-aided design and representation since 2020. She has taught at leading universities since 2011 including Clemson University (tenure-track), Illinois Institute of Technology (tenure-track) in Chicago, New York University Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, the City College of New York, and Penn State University. She is also a regular guest critic and lecturer at leading institutions across the globe such as Yale, Parsons, and more. Previously in practice, Maria has worked for Reed Hilderbrand in Boston, Perkins & Will, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Maria is a regular speaker and design critic in the fields of planning, urban design, and landscape architecture. Most recently, she was a 2021 ASLA Florida Chapter state award juror, a 2020 WLA (World Landscape Architecture) international critic. Maria enjoys giving back to the profession and local community. She was recently appointed as a member to the Landscape & Beautification Advisory Board for the City of Coral Gables where is resides with her two boys, Hammett and Harry. She is a past board member of the USGBC (South Florida Chapter) and past elected Regional Director to the Council of Educators in Landscape Architeture (CELA) for two regions. She will Chair the ASLA state Miami Conference on Landscape Architecture for 2023.

Maria holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design and a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University.