Alexandra Emberley is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator currently based in Tkaronto/Toronto. She lives and works on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat peoples, as well as the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

Alexandra’s studio research is an ongoing investigation into the intersections of handcraft, digital craftsmanship, and material intelligence, with a focus on embodied cognition and emergent technologies. Through drawing, hand and digital stitching, the garment/costume, and installation, her work investigates the tactile and temporal qualities of textiles, the convergence of craft and computation, and the capacity of materials to evoke sensed experiences. She is particularly interested in revealing new or unexpected interpretations of the archive. In a new AFA-funded project, she is examining relationships between materiality and code in a series of tactile interfaces pairing hand embroidery and digital animations. This work is part of a larger investigation into theories of play and the possibility for artificial agents to exhibit self-motivated, curious, and spontaneous behaviour.

Alexandra holds an Honours BA in Philosophy and Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto, an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta, and a PhD from York University’s Faculty of Education. Pursuing a passion for stitching, she then completed professional certification in couture embroidery at École Lesage in Paris with funding from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (2017), before going on to undertake a second MFA in Textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design (2023.)

With over two decades of experience in post-secondary education, Alexandra has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in drawing, printmaking, interdisciplinary studio and professional practices, alongside courses in film studies, visual and material culture, craft, and creative research methodologies. In collaboration with her first-year visual culture students at NSCAD, she installed an audio installation of their course compositions on “A Memoir of Something Beautiful” throughout Point Pleasant Park. From 2015 to 2018, she served as Chair of the School of Craft and Emerging Media at AUArts, where she helped implement the institution’s first MFA program in craft. With a diploma in Art Therapy from the Toronto Art Therapy Institute, she also brings a perspective attuned to emotional insight and process-based collaboration in both community-engaged and studio-based art practices.

Alexandra’s work has been supported by the Nova Scotia Arts Council, the HRM Open Projects Program, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. As a student, she received the RISD Museum Graduate Fellowship in Costume & Textiles (2022), the Rosanne Somerson Scholarship (2021, 2022), a RISD Graduate Fellowship (2020, 2022), the AFA Graduate Award in Art and Design (2012), and the Queen Elizabeth II Scholarship (2012).

Contact: aemberley2025@gmail.com