Catherine Wilmes is an architectural designer and educator invested in interrogating architecture's intersection with art and photography. Her designs are often derived from a photographic inquiry of the built environment and are informed by material experimentations at the scale of the model. She practiced in architectural offices in New York City, focusing on residential and educational projects across master planning, building design, interiors, and furniture. Her area of expertise is adaptive reuse, with projects in the United States, Brazil, and China.

Catherine joined the Cornell University faculty in 2022 as a Visiting Critic and is currently a Design Teaching Fellow (2023-2025). Prior to joining Cornell, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute GAUD (2019-2023), where she taught advanced design and residential studios at the graduate level, and an Instructor at Syracuse University School of Architecture (2023), where she taught integrated building design.

Identity Crisis (2024), her research as part of the Design Teaching Fellowship, was recently exhibited at Cornell University’s Bibliowicz Gallery. Her architectural media has also been featured in group exhibitions, including In the Round, On the Flat (2022) and Aesthetics of Prosthetics (2019) at Pratt Institute’s Siegel Gallery.

Catherine holds an M.Arch from Pratt Institute Graduate Architecture & Urban Design and a B.S.Arch from Ball State University College of Architecture & Planning.