Eliza ’00 uses textile design to bridge the worlds of art and science. While still in college at the Rhode Island Institute of Design (RISD) back in 2012, Eliza leapt at the unique opportunity to create a textile pattern for health communication in Africa. The resulting fabric used vivid imagery to spread health messaging for women’s reproductive health and was produced in Mali and Guinea. Eliza now works as executive director at the GAIA Vaccine Foundation, a Rhode Island nonprofit with the mission of infectious disease prevention in West Africa. Her research on traditional art practices has taken her to Tunisia and the Peruvian Amazon, where she has organized design workshops in many indigenous communities.
Eliza’s latest adventure is co-founding a social enterprise, Z Twist Design, which will work with international artists in the design of visual communication tools. These will be used to reduce health and education disparities in low-resource settings. Currently, Eliza and her team are working on several textile design projects for women and children’s health in Ethiopia and Niger.