page_title: Neri Oxman
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Neri Oxman / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Neri Oxman and Chuck Hoberman
context_page_description: Neri Oxman is an American–Israeli designer and professor at the MIT Media Lab, where she leads the Mediated Matter research group. She is known for art and architecture that combine design, biology, computing, and materials engineering.
  Her work embodies environmental design and digital morphogenesis, with shapes and properties that are determined by their context. She coined the phrase "material ecology" to define her work, placing materials in context. Stylistic trademarks include brightly colored and textured surfaces with structure at many scales, and composite materials whose hardness, color, and shape vary over an object. The results are often designed to be worn or touched, and inspired by nature and biology.
  Many of Oxman's projects use 3D printing and fabrication techniques. They include the Silk Pavilion, spun by silkworms released onto a nylon frame, Ocean Pavilion, a water-based fabrication platform that built structures out of chitosan,
  Glass I, the first 3D printer for optically transparent glass and a set of glasswork produced by it,
  and collections of 3D-printed clothing and wearables worn in couture shows and performances.
context_section_description: Oxman's work has been displayed around the world, with pieces in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts, SFMOMA, and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and Museum of Science.  Exhibits have also been shown at the Smithsonian, and the Beijing International Art Biennale and in 2020 a major retrospective of Oxman's work opened at the Museum of Modern Art.
  She published papers on parametric and contextual design, and developed specific engineering techniques to realize those designs in various materials. In 2006, she launched an interdisciplinary research project at MIT called materialecology, to experiment with generative design. This project and related collaborations informed her early art. She has promoted the idea of finding new ways to communicate about and collaborate on design.  In 2016, she helped launch the open multidisciplinary Journal of Design Science.
  She has appeared on the covers of Fast Company, Wired UK, ICON, and Surface magazine. Her work is mentioned as an inspiration for changing how materials and structures are designed, and her artistic works were described by Andrew Bolton as "otherworldly—defined by neither time nor place".
  On becoming a professor in 2010, Oxman founded the Mediated Matter research group at the MIT Media Lab.  There she expanded her collaborations into biology, medicine and wearables.
  In 2019 it was revealed that her lab received $125,000 from financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein through the MIT Media Lab and its director Joi Ito.  She directed her students in the lab to send Epstein a gift despite the concerns about Epstein they brought to her attention.
caption: Neri Oxman with Chuck Hoberman of Harvard Graduate School of Design
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