Categories: Arts & Culture | Digital Transformation | Innovation, Change & Creativity | Women's Spotlight
Travels from Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Janet Echelman is a North American artist, famous worldwide for her incredible ability to transform urban spaces with her incredible artwork. Echelman combines modern technology with ancient craft to create her distinguished art.
Janet Echelman sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks. Echelman’s work defies categorization, as it intersects Sculpture, Architecture, Urban Design, Material Science, Structural & Aeronautical Engineering, and Computer Science. Her art transforms with wind and light, and shifts from being “an object you look at, into an experience you can get lost in.”
Using unlikely materials from atomized water particles to engineered fiber fifteen times stronger than steel, Janet Echelman combines ancient craft with computational design software to create artworks that have become focal points for urban life on five continents, from places like Singapore, Sydney, Shanghai, and Santiago, to Beijing, Boston, New York and London. Some of her permanent works can be seen in cities such as Porto, Vancouver, San Francisco, West Hollywood, Phoenix, Eugene, Greensboro, Philadelphia, and Seattle.
Curiosity defines Janet Echelman’s nonlinear educational path. After graduating from Harvard College, she lived in a Balinese village for 5 years, then completed separate graduate programs in Painting and in Psychology. A recipient of an honorary Doctorate from Tufts University, Echelman has taught at MIT, Harvard and Princeton Universities.
Janet Echelman’s TED talk "Taking Imagination Seriously" has been translated into 35 languages with more than two million views. She is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Harvard Loeb Fellowship, Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellowship, and Fulbright Sr. Lectureship. Echelman has also received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts, honoring “the greatest innovators in America today.” In popular culture, Oprah ranked Echelman’s work #1 on her List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!, and Echelman was named an Architectural Digest Innovator for "changing the very essence of urban spaces."
