Neri Oxman

In 2011, Neri Oxman married Grammy Award-winning Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov who, according to an interview in 'Surface magazine', had "incredible influence" on her work. The couple has since then separated, even though the details about their divorce have not been revealed.

In early April 2018, 'Page Six' reported that she was spending time together with renowned Hollywood actor Brad Pitt after meeting through an architecture project at MIT. They reportedly bonded over their passion for architecture, design and art, even though the source claimed that they were strictly friends at the time.

Following the link-up with Pitt, it was revealed that she was actually dating billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman was happy with her current relationship.

Neri Oxman was born in 1976 in Haifa, Israel to Robert Oxman and Rivka Oxman. Both his parents are architects. She spent most of her childhood alternating between her grandmother's garden and her parent's architectural studio, thus learning a balance between nature and culture.

She relocated to Jerusalem and entered Hebrew University's Hadassah Medical School in 1997. Two years later, she decided to take up an architecture course at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

She next entered London Architectural Association School of Architecture from where she completed her master’s degree in 2004 with a thesis on using "structural, spatial and environmental" cues to drive shape generation. Moving to Boston in 2005, she joined the PhD program in architecture at MIT under adviser William J. Mitchell and wrote a thesis on material-aware design.

After completing her PhD from MIT, Neri Oxman became an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab in 2010, and currently also serves as the Sony Corporation Career Development Professor. At MIT, she later founded the Mediated Matter research group, of which she is also the director.

Subsequently, she focused on making use of different 3D printing techniques, often collaborating with printing companies like Stratasys. The Mediated Matter group has designed custom printers including a prototype to build 8-foot tall structures in outdoor spaces with its robotic arm and another to create free-standing objects without support structures.

In 2012, one of her first projects was to 3D-print her first set of body-sized wearable collection titled 'Imaginary Beings', which was inspired by legendary creatures. She then teamed up with fashion designer, Iris van Herpen, and materials engineer, Craig Carter, to 3D-print the multi-color and multi-material dress 'Anthozoa'.

In 2013, she began one of her best known projects, the 'Silk Pavilion', which is a polyhedral nylon-frame dome loosely woven by a robotic arm which was then finished by 6,500 free-ranging silkworms. It was an experiment to identify how silkworms respond to different surfaces and how to encourage them to spin onto an existing structure rather than spinning a cocoon.

Her 2014 installation titled 'Ocean Pavilion' consists of a water-based fabrication platform in which structures were built out of the chitin-like a water-soluble organic fiber chitosan. While the whole structure was made from the same base material, due to variations in how the fibers were deposited, the end-result was a combination of hard and soft structures.

Among Neri Oxman's vast list of innovative designs, some of the most notable ones include the 'Silk Pavilion' installation, 'Imaginary Beings' collection, 'Ocean Pavilion' installation and the 'Wanderers' collection.