about

Photo Credit: Stefania Yarhi

Anika Kozlowski is a designer, researcher, and educator whose work explores sustainable design through textile waste systems, secondhand clothing economies, circularity, and research-through-design. Across scholarship, fieldwork, and material practice, she studies how garments circulate, accumulate value, become waste, and are reimagined through design.

She is an Assistant Professor of Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her interdisciplinary background includes a PhD and MASc in environmental sciences, along with undergraduate training in microbiology and fashion design. This combination of scientific, design, and systems-based thinking shapes a research practice that moves across fieldwork, scholarship, material experimentation, and pedagogy.

Her research focuses on secondhand clothing systems, textile waste pathways, circular design, sustainable fashion micro-and-small enterprises, institutional material transitions, and sustainable design education. She is especially interested in where sustainability narratives break down, where waste becomes visible, and where design can open new possibilities for action.

Her recent creative research project, Re-Assembled: The Paper Doll Coat, received the Costume Society of America’s Betty Kirke Excellence in Research Award. More broadly, her work has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, Vogue Business, CNN, CBC, and The Conversation, and she has advised organizations including The Biomimicry Institute, the Joe Fresh Centre for Fashion Innovation, and TMU’s Fashion Zone.

She approaches sustainability not as a settled category, but as a complex and often contradictory terrain. Across research, teaching, and creative practice, her work reflects an ongoing effort to rethink fashion and textile systems through scholarship, design, and collaborative learning.