Anais Missakian

Anais Missakian is the Pevaroff-Cohn Family Chair in Textiles and Graduate Program Director of the department. She has held a full-time faculty position at RISD for over 30 years, serving as department head for more than 15 years, as interim provost from June 2022-July 2023 and as dean of Fine Arts from July 2011-August 2014. Additionally, she was the founding faculty mentor and academic program director for the Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF), an ongoing partnership between RISD and the Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation. 

In addition to faculty and administrative roles and service on numerous faculty search committees, Missakian served on the Brown/RISD Committee on Institutional Collaboration as well as the Fine Arts Acquisitions Committee of the RISD Museum. She was a faculty advisor on the collaborative NIKE Skin Project; Techstyle Haus, Solar Decathlon Europe project; and Art in Embassies, Rabat, Morocco Project.

A 1984 honors graduate of RISD, Missakian also attended Central Saint Martins in London and Michigan State University. Before returning to RISD to start her teaching career, she spent six years in New York working as a designer for a variety of textiles companies including Decorator’s Walk and China Seas. As an industry design consultant, she designs textile collections for architectural interior applications, and she recently led a small team of RISD faculty members and alums to design a carpet collection in collaboration with Sahar Carpets.

Past work includes design and production of printed and woven interior fabrics for Laura Lienhard, Inc. In addition, she and Lienhard created Jacquard and printed upholstery fabrics for the Kreiss Furniture Company in San Diego, CA. Other past clients include Sunbury Textile Mills, Quaker Fabric Corporation, Malden Mills, Martex, Macy’s and Westpoint/Stevens.

In recent years, Missakian was textile lead at Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA), a nonprofit institute headquartered near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and one of the latest members of the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) Institutes. She worked with a team of material scientists, engineers, textile designers and product designers to collaborate on projects focused on transforming traditional fibers, yarns and textiles into highly sophisticated integrated and networked devices and systems. She continues to collaborate with close colleagues at MIT and co-authored a paper on acoustic fabrics that was published in Nature in March 2022.