Paulina Berczynski is an artist and designer working primarily in textiles, printmaking and digital media. Her work often combines textiles, domestic objects, folk art, pop culture, and references to 1970s Poland from the time of the Soviet occupation. She is influenced by social justice movements, psychedelia, and the culture of her adopted home in Northern California. Paulina maintains a studio practice and writes about radical textiles for the Feral Fabric journal. She is currently conducting academic research on the Polish School of Textiles from the 1960s and 70s.

Paulina spent her early years in the factory city of Lodz, Poland, a former commercial textile production hub for the USSR. Her family left the country as refugees in 1980. Over the next decade her family moved frequently, finding community in wild intellectual Polish diasporas (think basement art parties and accordion dance music) in Canada and the US.

After attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Paulina started her career in art direction and event design. She then established FluffyCo, a design-centric lifestyle brand where she was owner and creative director for 15 years. Paulina has designed for clients such as Puma, Lucky Strike, and M&M Mars. Through her business, she also created custom products for Target, Urban Outfitters and Crate&Barrel.

More recently, Paulina earned an MFA in Fine Art from California College of the Arts, focusing on textiles and social practice. She has since written critically for Textile: A Journal of Cloth and Culture (based in the UK), and received an individual artist grant from the City of Berkeley to do work combining housing rights and traditional crafts. Individually and in collaboration as Feral Fabric, she has led textile-based workshops with California institutions such as HIgh Desert Test Sites, Berkeley Art Museum, NIAD Art Center and Southern Exposure.

pberczynski@cca.edu