Katherine Deidre Winter, 59, known as Katie, died on March 11th, 2025, surrounded by her husband and three daughters. The cause of her death was Multiple Myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow. She is survived by her husband, James Shulman, her daughters Kai (25), Camilla (22), and Emma (19); her mother, Anne Winter of Mystic, CT, and two sisters, Kaiulani Winter of Stowe, VT and Aliza Edwards of Concord, MA. She was predeceased by her father, Edward Winter.

Since 2000, Katie has run Katie Winter Architecture, a practice primarily devoted to educational and non-profit 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.

With her husband of 30 years, she raised her three daughters. 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 thought about her girls constantly, each of whom she understood and loved beyond measure.

She loved the apartment in New York that she designed and created for her family. Small Point, Maine was the other place that mattered to her. She always returned to it, not because it was a nice location for summer vacation but because she felt that she was incredibly fortunate to have a place that connected her immediate and extended family, full of fascinating history, colorful characters, and strong women.

She helped the design committees at St. James Church and the New York Society Library. She loved cartoons, Borromini churches, tulips, walking in Central Park or anywhere with her family or friends, and cake. For every birthday she transformed the family kitchen with streamers and decorations. She crafted intricate, handmade cards for every field trip and holiday.

She will be forever missed.

Few people knew of her disease and few of those who did knew how serious it had become. Because of a weakened immune system, COVID limited how she could conduct her life in various ways. 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.

In lieu of flowers, donations in her memory might be made to the Small Point Summer School or Dr. Kenneth Anderson's Research Fund at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. 

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