Irina Shapiro is a designer, educator and curator. Her practice combines investigative artistic projects with educational events and research programmes that are often developed in collaboration with communities and organisations. Trained as a designer and scenographer, she sees pedagogy as her current dominant medium of practice and as a space for public engagement. Her educational work explores situational, participatory and sensorial qualities of applied arts. Shapiro’s research themes focus on pedagogical, artistic and storytelling approaches that act within multiscale, multi-species environments and open up interrelational forms of knowing. 

Shapiro is a co-initiator of Open Set, an alternative platform for art/design research and development; a core tutor of the Master Education in Arts programme at the Piet Zwart Institute; a tutor of the New Earth course, Social Practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy; and an associate at the RASL (Rotterdam Arts & Sciences Lab).

Currently: Artistic research project Witnessing Garden 404, Symposium Instituting Relationality: on Innovating Modes of Working between Museum and School
Highlights: School for Multi-Species Knowledges, Reading group Co-respond: Bodies, Voices, Spaces in Art Education
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