Emily Holtzman
Location:
- Providence, Rhode Island, US
Website:
Bio:
Emily Holtzman is an artist, designer, and researcher from upstate New York (not the city). She currently resides in Providence and has been told that she has seamlessly adopted the native Rhode-Islander lifestyle. In 2018, she received a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). During her time at RISD she found true love in industrial knitting and jacquard weaving. She has been an assistant researcher and 3D weaver for the Virtual Textiles Research Group (VTRG) since January 2018. Working with VTRG has solidified Emily’s belief that the future of textiles lies in engineering fabrics for structural performance by giving them inherent mechanical properties starting at the material and design level. Emily is co-inventor of Embonet, a knit medical device for aortic bypass surgeries developed in collaboration with biomedical engineers at Brown University, which won first place in the Johns Hopkins Healthcare Design Competition in April 2018 and 3rd place in the 2019 Brown Venture Prize. This experience sparked her interest in medical textile applications and collaborations with left brainers. In May 2018, Emily exhibited her degree project at the Design Center’s 1stDibs gallery in New York City. Her personal work explores the butterfly effect and different forces that impact young women as they come of age, as well as the development of knit structures that prevent embolic debris from reaching the brain during open heart surgeries. Emily strongly believes that engineered textiles can save the world and in the efficacy that comes along with incorporating multiple subjects in one sentence, even when it results in throwing proper grammar to the wind.
