Julia Lohmann

Born in Germany in 1977, multidisciplinary designer Julia Lohmann studied graphic design at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design in the U.K., graduating in 2001 with a Bachelor’s degree. Her final project was a book on artwork created by maggots, which she curated and presented with partner Gero Grundmann in a series of unofficial exhibitions at London’s Tate Modern. She then moved to Iceland to work on a horse and sheep farm, before relocating to London to pursue a Master’s in Design Products at the Royal College of Arts. In 2004, the same year that she obtained her graduate degree, Lohmann launched her eponymous studio in London.

Lohmann’s work exists in the overlaps between design, science, craft, and art. Ongoing themes include the investigation of socially constructed value systems and the transformation of nature into artifice (and vice versa). In recent years, for example, Lohmann has developed seaweed into a material for craft and design. She also runs the Department of Seaweed initiated at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013.

Her objects and installations are exhibited worldwide and form part of major private and public collections such as the British Council and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

In addition to her active design career, Lohmann has been a professor of design at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg (HFBK) since 2011. She is pursuing a practice-based PhD in design through a joint program between the Royal College of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum that is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. Her expected graduation date is 2015.

Lohmann lives and works in London and Hamburg.