Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese performance and installation artist now living in Berlin. She is best known for creating environments that are room-filling and monumental, yet delicate and poetic. She focuses on themes of remembrance and oblivion, dreaming and sleeping, traces of the past and childhood, and dealing with anxieties. Many of her installations involve impenetrable webs of black thread that enclose household and everyday objects: a burned-out piano, a wedding dress, a lady's mackintosh, sometimes even the sleeping artist herself.

Other bodies of work involve window frames and bed frames. Shiota stacks them up to form sweeping architectural structures that seem to defy gravity: a house, a high tower, an architectural landscape. She spent several years training in Germany with Marina Abramović, who influenced her interests in exploring physical endurance and the psychology of spatial perception.

The Design and Craft Lecture Series is funded by the Wornick Endowment Fund.