on sabbatical academic year 2024–25

Before assuming the role of provost at RISD in July 2022, Anais Missakian was the Pevaroff-Cohn Family Endowed Chair in Textiles and professor and graduate program director of Textiles. She has held a full-time faculty position in Textiles for more than 30 years, including as department head for more than 15 years.

Additionally, in partnership between RISD and the Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation, Missakian served as faculty mentor and academic program director for the Sheikha Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Fellowship for Emerging Artists (SEAF). She is currently continuing in a consulting role for SEAF, now in its ninth year. Missakian also served as RISD’s dean of Fine Arts from July 2011 through August 2014, providing leadership and support to 10 departments.

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, 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 textile companies including Decorator’s Walk and China Seas.

As a design consultant for the textile industry, she designs textile collections for architectural interior applications. 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 clients included Sunbury Textile Mills, Quaker Fabric Corporation, Malden Mills, Martex, Macy’s and Westpoint/Stevens. Missakian’s other clients have included Sunbury Textile Mills, Quaker Fabric Corporation, Malden Mills, Martex, Macy’s and Westpoint/Stevens.

Most recently, 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 works with a team of material scientists, engineers, textile designers and product designers to collaborate on projects that focus on the transformation of 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 this past March.