Emily Rosa Shahaj

Bio

I started my career with a BFA in Communications Design from Syracuse University, followed by four years’ experience as an Art Director in advertising agencies. Here, I worked with global clients including Mars Wrigley and Pepsi. Fashion design and sewing were a lifelong hobby until a colleague and I entered and placed in the 2019 Paper Fashion Show. From here I moved from the US to the UK to start as a postgraduate student at UCA on the MA Printed Textiles for Fashion and Interiors course. While studying, I became interested in Posthumanist theory and why we interact and express ourselves differently through digital media compared to physical media. I learned 3D software and my final project was expressed through 3D textiles. The animated prints were co-designed with AI and artificial life colonies trained on my social media data.

After graduating I published research through UCA’s Centre for Sustainable Design, advocating for the uptake of 3D practices for fashion sustainability. I founded a virtual fashion house specialised in rentable NFTs, with work exhibited in London, Miami, Germany, and Singapore and sold on digital fashion marketplaces. This morphed into a technology startup which leveraged blockchain to make any digital garment wearable across any game or metaverse and to match the appearance of each. This required innovation in open-source avatar formats, NFT infrastructure, AI, and the digital fashion creation pipeline. The startup was backed by Outlier Ventures, was selected for the Sony Startup Innovation Bootcamp, and was a principal member of the Metaverse Standards Forum.

I have broadly spoken at global conferences on digital fashion, NFTs, and the Metaverse, and co-authored a chapter on fashion technology in the book Accelerating Sustainability in Fashion, Clothing, and Textiles (2023). I look forward to pursuing a research degree on the subject of identity and expression in virtual worlds.