Verena Michels works as a product and fashion designer with a passion for field trips and research. She enjoys transdisciplinary collaborations, making exhibitions, giving workshops and launching products.

She is a lecturer and educator, combining topics of fashion research, biomaterials, art & activism with creative entrepreneurship. She is a regular respectively guest lecturer respectively consultant at institutions such as Universität der Künste Berlin, Akademie Mode und Design Berlin / Hamburg, Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle, Gerrit Rietveld Akademie Amsterdam, NL. 

In 2021, she founded the plant-based rainwear label Weather Underground, which works closely with agricultural raw material suppliers and the packaging sector. To create a more empowered platform for independent, fossil-free design innovatiors, she co-founded Biomaterials in Practice - SORRY WE ARE TRYING: a place to exhibit not only potentials, but barriers and shortcomings as a realistic side effect of transformation.

She will always be a fan of BLESS (Berlin / Paris) and used to be a member of the team there. She still works with them on a project-by-project basis, e.g. BLESSadvanced Applebag and as a freelance print designer since 2018.  

Inspired by Anna Tsing`s writing on the Matsutake mushroom, she co-founded Veronica Shiitake, an association of three fashion designers who offer their services in designing and manufacturing products for cultural institutions using sophisticated deadstock materials (see taz zahl ich). They support and promote each other in a kind of professional part-time marriage / long-distance relationship. 

During her time in the Netherlands, she studied at AMFI first, and graduated at Gerrit Rietveld Academie. She showed Trümmerfrau collection at Amsterdam Fashion Week, worked with fashion designer Conny Groenewegen, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Smart Project Space. She ist featured on Mediamatic
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