Jennifer Dranttel

Jennifer Dranttel has a BArch from the University of Colorado (2002), an MFA in Fibers from Savannah College of Art & Design (2017), and spent over a decade as a professionally-exhibiting fine artist. She has shown a couture fashion collection at New York and Paris Fashion Weeks, and participated in artist residencies and exhibitions all over the world- including most notably the International Print Triennial (Finland, 2022), The International Original Print Exhibition (London, 2021), and the USA National Printmaking Exhibition (2015). She is in her final year of a fully-funded PhD at De Montfort University titled “Biomimicry-inspired Material Innovation in Mongolian Gers to Combat Negative Indoor Air Quality”, inspired by two years teaching Art and Design at the British School of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Her research is focused on developing biomaterial innovations and open-source teaching materials to encourage scalable citizen-led design-based solutions to tackle the issues of air pollution, waste mismanagement, and cultural flux facing Ulaanbaatar. She works within the realms of Speculative Design and future-thinking across Design Theory, Textiles, Biomaterials, Education for Sustainable Development, and Architecture. She has presented her research in a TedX Talk (2022), The UK Conference on Circular Wool (2022), Conference on Living Textile Architectures (2022), and in Dubai at COP28 (2023). She is currently the BA (Hons) Textile Design Programme Leader at Loughborough University.