Textiles, Technology
Residency Dates: June 2026
Studio H Canada is thrilled to welcome Nishra Ranpura, a multidisciplinary visual artist, researcher, creative technologist, and educator whose work brings together weaving, digital technologies, and participatory making. Drawing from both traditional textile practices and emerging technologies, Nishra explores how materials, machines, and human bodies interact to create knowledge, memory, and meaning. Her practice challenges conventional boundaries between craft and technology, inviting us to reconsider the role of labor, storytelling, and embodied experience in an increasingly digital world.
During her residency, Nishra will continue developing experimental woven systems that combine loom-based practices with sensors, microcontrollers, and responsive technologies. Building on projects such as The Weaver (video below), her research investigates weaving as both a material process and a computational language, revealing unexpected connections between handwork, machines, and collective knowledge. Selected guest artists will have a unique opportunity to engage directly with this process during an Open Studio Day at the end of the residency, when Nishra will share works in progress on the loom, demonstrate interactive woven technologies. Participants will be able to try weaving themselves while learning about the intersections of textiles, computation, and making. Highlights of the Open Studio Day will be shared on our website and social media.
Residency Goals
During the residency, I aim to expand my research on crafted machines, woven computation, and embodied making by developing experimental loom prototypes that foreground labor, storytelling, and material intelligence. My practice interweaves textiles, physical computation, digital fabrication, and participatory processes.
I plan to use the dedicated studio as a site of experimentation, reflection, collaboration, and as an active laboratory where I can prototype responsive woven structures, test interactive textile systems with physical computation using microcontrollers and electronic sensors, and sketch new relationships between the body, machine, and material.
The studio’s focus on artistic exploration, natural surroundings, and dedicated making time aligns closely with my desire to situate craft within broader conversations of ecology, memory, and process. The opportunity to work in an environment that values slowness, presence, and material engagement is deeply important to me, especially as my work navigates themes of care, repetition, and embodied knowledge.
Gallery
About the Artist
Nishra Ranpura is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, creative technologist, and educator based between New York, NY and Austin, Texas. She holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design of the New School in NY, built on a foundation of a Bachelor in Textile Design from the National Institute of Fashion Technology in India. Her practice explores interdisciplinary interactions, systems, and languages across the physical and digital realms through experimental and speculative narratives. Working across woven textiles, digital fabrication, and interactive media, she investigates embodied interfaces, crafted machines, and material literacy. Her work centers accessible and transparent processes, and the temporalities of labor, fostering dialogue around technological futures and collective knowledge.
Nishra is a national artist at the A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been exhibited at the BRIC Gallery, the Clive Davis Gallery, and A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; and The Dairy Barn Arts Center in Athens, Ohio. Her research has been published as a book chapter by Transcript Verlag, as a peer reviewed paper by the Design Research Society, and as an article in Surface Design Journal. She has shared her research and facilitated discussions at the AIGA Design Conference, New Media Caucus Symposium, and Open Hardware Summit. Across national and international settings, her projects take form as installations, publications, conferences, workshops, and participatory systems that invite collaboration, resist erasure, and cultivate shared community-driven ways of knowing and making.
You can learn more about Nishra on their website: https://nishraranpura.com and follow her on Instagram: @nishraranpura.
Artists of all media and disciplines are welcome to apply to Studio H Canada International Art Residency – please check out the link here to apply.
Check out previous posts about artists here.
