Indira Allegra is the founder of Indira Allegra Studio—a performative craft design studio using weaving as a ritual, conceptual framework to craft living structures off the loom and in the world. This approach to design uses poetry as a method to “read” environments for clues “hidden between the lines” or clues hiding between what is being clearly articulated by a site and what is not. Of importance are desires for transformation that haunt sites and beings experiencing them. Thinking as a poet, threads of connection between disparate experiences can be discovered. Moving as a weaver, the fates of seemingly disconnected stories, objects, and beings become interlaced and transmuted into a greater whole.

Poetry and weaving are universal techniques for bringing different materials into conversation for a precise kind of call-and-response so that new structures of knowledge might be expressed. A living structure can be performed as a memorial, a text, or the movement of human and nonhuman behavior across a rolling planet. Rather than focus on “human-centered” design, the Studio situates human concerns within a broader network of more-than-human desires and ecological temporalities.

Allegra’s work has been featured in Artforum, Art Journal, BOMB Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and KQED, and in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design; the Arts Incubator in Chicago; the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; and the Museum of the African Diaspora, among others. 

Allegra’s writing has been featured in Theater Magazine, TEXTILE: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, American Craft magazine, Manual: A Journal About Art and Its Making, Cream City Review, and Foglifter Journal, among others. They have been the recipient of numerous awards including a United States Artists Fellowship, the Burke Prize, the Gerbode Foundation’s Choreography Award, an Art Matters Artist2Artist Fellowship, a Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts’ Artist Project Grant, a Lambda Literary fellowship and the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award.