These are the people who will be presenting classes during FoldFest Spring 2024!
Mi Wu
My real name is Guo Song.I am 45 years old. I'm an architect and live in China's northern city, Dalian.My two books have been published so far - Duo-colorigami and Multi-colorigami.
Michał Kosmulski
https://origami.kosmulski.org/
I design most of all tessellations and boxes, but I enjoy trying out something different once in a while and have designed a number of modulars and simple figurative designs as well. In my models, I value elegance and a clean look, trying to avoid the visible grid lines which are a staple of many tessellation designs. I like combining techniques usually used for different types of models, for example wet folding with tessellations. I am also interested in paper, the basic folding material, and my website includes a number of paper reviews in its blog section.
Fumiaki Kawahata
I was born in 1957 in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. I am a member of the Japan Origami Academic Society. I have enjoyed origami and paper crafts since I was a child, and have been presenting my creative works since the 1980s. My favorite origami motifs are animals and living things, and I am currently continuing my creative activities.
Brandon Wong
https://web.mit.edu/wongb/www/origami/
I'm a mechanical engineering student at MIT. My focus in origami is to advance methods for representational design so that more people can design more things. In particular, I work with a lot of hex pleating and non-uniaxial structures, applied to models of a wide range of complexity levels.
Michael LaFosse
Michael G. LaFosse has been an origami artist and sculptor for over forty years. Michael is inspired by nature, preferring to study subjects in natural habitats. Michael and his partner, Richard Alexander, co-founded the Origamido Studio in 1996. They work together to design origami and to make the perfect, custom archival papers for each creation. Their works have graced museums worldwide, and their monumental sculpture collaborations are part of the traveling exhibit Origami in the Garden, produced by Kevin Box Studios of Cerrillos, NM.
Bodo Haag
Bodo was born in 1999 in Tübingen ( Germany ) he has been folding ever since he was 6 years old and started creating his own models when he was 7. He is mainly interested in designing animals, most recently focussing on color changes and textures
Bradley Tompkins
Meet Bradley Tompkins, a Los Angeles-based cultural creative and an avid origami enthusiast. Bradley has been practicing the art of paper folding and craftwork for over 40 years, ever since he started folding in grade-school to keep himself occupied during class. His passion for origami and lifelong learning is rooted in the belief that the mind and imagination hold incredible power and led to the publication of several books in the series “Fold This Box”. Bradley is an active member of several origami groups, including the POP, Origami USA, and the international CFC. Bradley holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature and a master’s degree in Management Information Systems.
Amanda Ghassaei
Amanda Ghassaei is a researcher, computer programmer, and maker based in Philadelphia, PA. Drawing inspiration from natural processes and traditional crafts, she creates computational tools for playfully exploring form and function — often incorporating real-time physics simulations, digital fabrication, and generative design in her work. She released on online origami simulation app (origamisimulator.org) in 2017 and is currently working on new 3D modeling software for origami with applications in architecture, engineering, and manufacturing.
Nate Hauer
Nate Hauer is a 22.5° origami designer living in the Puget Sound. He works professionally in habitat restoration and environmental justice. Taking artistic inspiration from the natural world, his works prioritize efficiency and anatomical accuracy.
Jeremy Shafer
https://www.youtube.com/jeremyshaferorigami
Origami has been my biggest passion since I was 10 years old. I most enjoy trying to design whimsical models that fly, spin, or somehow move. I've published a few books of my models and produced the Bay Area Rapid Folders (BARF) Newsletter for 15 years, but in 2011 I switched from print media to making video tutorials on YouTube. I make a new video every week and I do 4 hours of livestreams for my members every month, where I design models on the spot by request. In addition to making YouTube videos I also earn my living entertaining at county fairs and other festivities. I'm also an avid juggler, unicyclist, handwhistler and salsa dancer and my sport of choice is unicycle basketball which I play every week in my hometown, Berkeley, CA
Talo Kawasaki
Talo Kawasaki is a Brooklyn, NY-based artist and educator whose passion for origami blossomed from a pastime to a serious discipline: teaching in schools, museums, and conferences; creating published origami models; and producing art with his paper folding as a designer for the American Museum of Natural History's Origami Holiday Tree; as a "wrangler" for show props for regional productions of Rajiv Joseph’s play "Animals Out of Paper"; and other exhibitions and events in NYC and elsewhere.
Jason Ku
Dr Jason Ku is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National University of Singapore, and has been designing and researching origami for over 20 years. While studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he served as President of MIT's origami club, OrigaMIT, for eight years, and is the current faculty advisor to the student club, NUS Origami. He has served on OrigamiUSA's Board of Directors continuously since 2011, acting as Treasurer from 2015-2019 and Chair from 2019 to the present.
Lieven Peeters
Lieven Peeters, born in 2004, is a paper folder from Belgium, studying engineering sciences and architecture at the university of Leuven. In the past year he's been exploring the possibilities of a technique called wetfolding.
Rupert Maleczek
Rupert Maleczek is an accomplished Architect, Researcher, and Digital Consultant, currently serving as a Senior Scientist at the esteemed i.sd (Institute of Structure and Design) within the University of Innsbruck. With a rich background spanning various disciplines, he delves into the intricate interplay between form, structure, performance, materiality, and the realms of digital and physical production.
His multidisciplinary approach is driven by a profound curiosity to unravel complex relationships, aiming to empower greater control through strategic simplification. This process, also known as simplexity enables an unpretentious access to complex processes for specialists as well as non-specialists.
M. Faraz Mangi
M. Faraz Mangi is an origami artist based in Australia. Outside of origami, he is a medical student with an interest in internal medicine and radiology. He has been interested in paper folding for most of his life, but fell in love with the art form when he started to design models 3 years ago.
An area of origami central to his work is the colour change. He is fascinated by the structures and methods used to produce models which showcase both sides of the paper. Frequently, he folds 2D models that consist of colour changes contained within a simple shape. Additionally, he finds joy in folding unusual subjects and tries to imbue a playfulness in his designs.
Autumn Thieme
Autumn Thieme has been folding origami since the age of five. When she's not watching a Godzilla film or folding origami, she takes care of her pet burmese pythons.
Ivan Danny Handoko
Ivan Danny Handoko is an origami designer that enjoys learning various range of origami design methods. He has been designing various origami models for more than a decade, ranging from circle packing to a kusudama. He is currently learning the process of designing origami figures with 15 and 30 degrees.
Hugo Akitaya
Hugo is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell in the Computer Science Department. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Tufts University co-advised by Prof. Erik Demaine, and M.Eng. at Tsukuba University under Prof. Jun Mitani. While his research often studies origami, he also likes to fold it!