Her work moves between artisanal and industrial processes, critical design education, biomaterials, regenerative material applications and contemporary product cultures. She is particularly interested in the relationship between aesthetics, production systems and public imagination — and in how design can create new forms of relevance, attachment and use.
Verena Michels teaches and develops experimental educational formats across fashion, material research and design systems. Her teaching combines fashion research, biomaterials, critical communication, creative entrepreneurship and hands-on prototyping — often focusing on how experimental ideas can be translated into products, public engagement and new forms of cultural and economic relevance.
She has taught, lectured and led workshops at institutions including Universität der Künste Berlin, Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, AMD Berlin/Hamburg and Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam.
Alongside her teaching, she has worked as an artistic startup advisor, supporting emerging designers and interdisciplinary creative practitioners in developing products, production strategies and sustainable approaches to market entry.
Recent teaching formats explore the relationship between collective practice, product development and entrepreneurial thinking within design education — proposing production, retail and public interaction not as compromises to artistic practice, but as part of a contemporary design vocabulary.
In 2021, she founded the plant-based rainwear project Weather Underground, exploring the intersection of agriculture, material development and fashion applications. She also co-founded SORRY WE ARE TRYING – Biomaterials in Practice, a platform connecting independent designers and material innovators working on post-fossil futures and the realities, frictions and limitations of material transformation.
From 2015 to 2018, Verena Michels worked as Production Manager for BLESS (Berlin/Paris), coordinating international production processes and collaborations across independent manufacturers, artisanal workshops and industrial partners. Since then, she has continued collaborating with BLESS on a freelance basis, including print design and product collaborations such as the BLESSadvanced Applebag.
During her years in the Netherlands, she studied at Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam after attending AMFI, and developed the collection Women of Shreds, presented at Amsterdam Fashion Week in 2014.