Ana Piñeyro is a designer and researcher whose practice explores matter’s inherent capacity to move. Working with textiles and soft materials, she engages with the expressive possibilities of transformation and movement, creating soft structures whose behaviour unfolds in relation to their surroundings, changing their form over time.
The relationship between material, structure and behaviour is central to her practice. Matter’s morphological and structural organisation, together with irregularity, variation and constraint, influences features such as rhythm, intensity, trajectory and speed, giving rise to movements with different expressive qualities.
Her practice is grounded in making and combines intuitive material exploration with systematic investigation. Open-ended experimentation generates conditions in which unexpected material responses emerge, becoming openings for further enquiry. Pursuing these responses develops the material and technical understanding needed to investigate their possibilities further.
Ana’s interdisciplinary career spans academia, industry and research labs in Uruguay, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and France, with work developed across experimental textile design, advanced functional materials, smart textiles and design research. She has taught textiles, smart materials and design research at universities in Europe.
She holds a PhD in Textiles from the Royal College of Art and an MSc in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media from Pompeu Fabra University. She has conducted postdoctoral research at EnsadLab, École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs–Université PSL, and contributed to the development of ESMOD Research Lab. Her work has been published, presented and exhibited internationally, and has received awards and funding from Miquel Mas Molas Foundation and the Institute for Catalan Studies, FAD, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and ANII–IDB Lab, among others.
