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

Working across drawing, embroidery, textiles, costume, installation, and digital media, Alexandra’s practice explores relationships among memory, materiality, and technology. Her research approaches art, craft, and computation as practices of translation, transforming archival materials through analog and digital processes. Informed by theories of play, spectatorship, and embodiment, she is interested in surfaces and interfaces as sites of mediation. Recent projects, including her RISD MFA thesis Legend (2023) and the AFA-funded for D: becoming a tree (2024), examine gender, nature, and metamorphosis through textile and costume-based forms.

creaturely, a current AFA-funded project, brings together hand embroidery, creative coding, animation, and artificial intelligence in a series of tactile interfaces that pair animated code-poems with hand-embroidered works. Developed in dialogue with AI systems, the work emerged through experimentation and error, as unexpected responses became material for further development. Drawing on E.O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia, surrealism, and the creature’s narrative in Frankenstein, the project explores how artistic practice makes visible new relationships between humans, technologies, and the more-than-human world.

Alexandra holds an Hons 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 completed professional certification in couture embroidery at École Lesage in Paris (2017) with funding from the AFA, before undertaking a second MFA in Textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design (2023).

Alexandra has over twenty years of teaching experience in post-secondary institutions. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in drawing, printmaking, interdisciplinary studio, professional practices, visual and material culture, film studies, craft, and creative research methods. She held a ranked Assistant Professor position at NSCAD University in Foundations and a permanent appointment at the Alberta University of the Arts in Visual Culture. At AUArts, she also served as Chair of the School of Craft and Emerging Media from 2015 to 2018, contributing to the implementation of the institution's first MFA program in craft. At NSCAD, in collaboration with her first-year students, she developed an audio installation of their compositions on the theme A Memoir of Something Beautiful, which was installed throughout Point Pleasant Park in Halifax. She also holds a diploma in Art Therapy from the Toronto Art Therapy Institute, which informs her commitment to process-based, relational, and community-engaged approaches to making and teaching..

Her work has been supported by the Nova Scotia Arts Council, the Halifax Regional Municipality's Open Projects Program, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. As a student, she received a RISD Graduate Fellowship, the RISD Museum Graduate Fellowship in Costume & Textiles, and the Rosanne Somerson Scholarship, a U of A Dept of Art and Design Scholarship, the AFA Graduate Award in Art and Design, and the Queen Elizabeth II Scholarship.

Contact: aemberley2025@gmail.com