Joanna Berzowska is Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts and Director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Digital Technologies at Concordia University. She is a member of the Hexagram Research Institute in Montreal and the founder and research director of XS Labs, where her team develops innovative methods and applications in electronic textiles and responsive garments.

Her art and design work has been shown in the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in NYC, the V&A in London, the Millenium Museum in Beijing, various SIGGRAPH Art Galleries, ISEA, the Art Directors Club in NYC, the Australian Museum in Sydney, NTT ICC in Tokyo, and Ars Electronica Center in Linz among others.

She lectures internationally about the field of electronic textiles and related social, cultural, aesthetic, and political issues. She was recently selected for the Maclean's 2006 Honour Roll as one of "thirty nine Canadians who make the world a better place to live in".

She received her Masters of Science from MIT for her work titled Computational Expressionism and subsequently worked with the Tangible Media Group of the MIT Media Lab and cofounded International Fashion Machines in Boston. She holds a BA in Pure Math and a BFA in Design Arts.

photos by R. Borshan (c) 2007

XS Labs is a design research studio with a focus on innovation in the fields of electronic textiles and reactive garments, where we try to break down the traditional boundaries between disciplines. Many of our electronic textile innovations come from the fact that we look at the technical but also cultural history of how textiles (and garments) have been made for generations (weaving, stitching, embroidery, knitting, beading, quilting, tailoring) but use materials with different electro-mechanical properties, which enables us to construct more complex textiles and garments with electronic properties.

Joanna Berzowska, Marguerite Bromley, and Marcelo Coelho
photos by Jessica Butler, (c) XS Labs 2005