Aleksandra Gaca

(Lodz, Poland, 1969) designs innovative woven textiles at the intersection of art, design and architecture. In over two decades as a textile designer, she has devoted herself to pushing the technical boundaries of weaving: pioneering three-dimensional textiles and textile constructions, and becoming an expert in their design, manufacture and use.

She works with leading brands and architects, and has won numerous international design awards. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of museums that include the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, New York; the National Museum, Warsaw; and the Textiel Museum in Tilburg. She studied at the Academy of Art in The Hague, and lives and works in the Netherlands.

Dorota Stępniak

Curator, researcher, journalist and lecturer. Originator and manager of the first Design Festival in Poland - Łódź Design (2007-2011) and operational manager of FashionPhilosophy Fashion Week Poland. For 4 years she worked for IDZ - International Design Center in Berlin. She is the founder and Creative Director of the Content Story Foundation, which initiates activities integrating critical and speculative thinking at the border of science, art, design, technology, fashion and human experience.

Curator of such projects as: Body (2016),  Human - Distribution of Resources II (2017), Strong Cover (2016 - 2020), Overload (2018), About the Undiscovered Future (2020),  The Charm of Knowledge (2021), Glitch. Fuck The Porcelain & Glitch. True Porcelain Lasts Forever (2021-2022). Her projects were presented, among others. as part of Dutch Design Week, London Design Biennale and Designers' Open in Leipzig.

Dorota Stępniak is also a consultant in the field of creating strategies for creators and representatives of creative industries, including events and services. She graduated from the Faculty of Materials Technology and Textile Design at the Lodz University of Technology, specializing in Textile Architecture.

WWW: issuu.com

Hella Jongerius

(1963, the Netherlands) is one of the world’s leading designers, known for her research-driven approach and vigorous work on uniting craftsmanship and industrial production, infusing mass produced objects with imperfection, sensibility and character. She founded her Jongeriuslab design studio in 1993, and has worked on commissioned projects for Vitra, Maharam, the interior design of the Delegates’ Lounge of the United Nations Headquarters and the cabin interiors for the Dutch airline KLM. She has also initiated many independent projects, with exhibitions at the Design Museum London (2017), Die Neue Sammlung at Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2017), the Nationalmuseum in   Stockholm (2018), Lafayette Anticipations in Paris (2019) and Gropius Bau in Berlin (2021). Jongerius’s work can be found in the permanent collections including the MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Die Neue Sammlung and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. Since 2009 she has lived and worked in Berlin.

Janis Jefferies

Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts

Co-editor-in-chief Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of World Textiles, due 2023

She is an artist, writer and curator. For 30 years she worked at Goldsmiths, University of London leading textile, art and research programmes. She has published and exhibited internationally since 1980, most recently in 2019, The Enchantment of Cloth was shown at shown at the Central de Diseo, Madrid and at the 5th International Art and Science Exhibition and Symposium co-hosted by Tsinghua University and National Museum of China, in Beijing.

In 2019, Jefferies curated Breaching Borders, the National exhibition of Polish Tapestry, City Art Gallery, part of the 16th International Triennial of Tapestry, Lodz, Poland and was the first international curator, FibreArt Triennial, Hangzhou, China.

Jessica Hemmings

Jessica Hemmings is Professor of Craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She studied Textile Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA (Honors) in 1999 and Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, earning an MA (Distinction) in 2000. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2006, is published by kalliope paperbacks under the title Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (2008). In 2010 she edited a collection of essays titled In the Loop: Knitting Now published by Black Dog and in 2012 edited The Textile Reader (Berg) and wrote Warp & Weft (Bloomsbury). Her editorial and curatorial project, Cultural Threads: transnational textiles today, is a book about postcolonial thinking and contemporary textile practice (Bloomsbury: 2015) and was accompanied by a travelling exhibition Migrations (2015-2017). Forthcoming publications include the second edition of the Textile Reader (2023) and a monograph about Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen.