Adornment
Industrial Design
Explorations
Tattoo
Fine Art
About
Sophia Ponomarenko
Rhode Island School of Design BFA Industrial Design ‘2025
I grew up in a ballet studio - both my parents professional ballet dancers from the Soviet Union. Being surrounded by ballet for over half my life, prior to quitting and pursuing design, taught be discipline, elegance, and obsessive passion. I strive to channel this passion into everything I make, focuing on the body, movement, and the interactions between beauty, autonomy, and transgression. My designs are heavily influenced by love for dance, music, fashion, and theater. My design philosophy involves reimagining objects through a focus on their relationships with us. Recent projects have aimed to explore objects’ boundaries, and how we can abstract why/how/what we surround our bodies and minds with, and how those choices are reflective of ourselves, and everything we interact with in this chaotic time. Through process, material/textural composition, and metaphor, I strive to reinvent concepts and imbue everything I make with significance and agency, forming relationships between wearer, object, and viewer that go beyond the surface and enter a space where object is inseparable from body and becomes a tool for the wearer to express their truest self.
I hope to create pieces that become extensions of their users and have long, meaningful lives after their making.
Resume and PDF portfolio available upon request.