For retired faculty member Dr. Joan M.E. Gaither, textiles has always been a vehicle for connection. Through story quilts and community-based projects, she treated fabric as living history — printed with photographs, layered with objects, and stitched by many hands. Whether working with student teachers or young people from Baltimore through the Young People’s Studio, Joan showed how hands-on making can unite classrooms and communities, turning the process into a shared experience.

A generation later,  Mia Weiner ’13 (Fiber BFA) approaches the loom with the same rigor and care. Starting with digital photographs, she breaks images down into woven instructions — pixels becoming thread, code becoming cloth. Her process bridges the ancient and the contemporary, balancing precision with intuition, structure with vulnerability. The result is work that is both deeply physical and quietly intimate, where the image doesn’t sit on the surface; it is the surface.

That lineage continues globally with  Kurina Sohn ’15 (Fiber BFA), whose practice moves fluidly between textiles, garments, code, AI, and immersive environments. Grounded in the material rigor of Fiber — dyeing, pattern-making, and process-driven research — Sohn uses textile logic as a way of thinking across dimensions, translating the relationship between 2D and 3D into digital and computational space. Now based between Seoul and Amsterdam, and teaching in the Netherlands, her work asks how knowledge is constructed, whether by hand, body, or machine.

Across studios and decades, Fiber at MICA remains a place where students move between 2D and 3D, digital and tactile, concept and labor — investigating meaning through making, one thread at a time.