Dr Paula Nerlich
Profession
Associate Lecturer, MA Biodesign
College
Central Saint Martins
Person Type
Teacher
Biography
Dr Paula Nerlich is a biodesigner, researcher, and educator working across textiles, material experimentation, and living systems. Her practice explores how we can design with living systems, considering how biodesigners can shape the conditions in which biological processes grow, transform, and respond, while remaining attentive to the behaviours and possibilities that emerge through working with living matter.
Originally trained in textile design, Paula’s practice has developed through an ongoing engagement with living and time-based materials, including bacterial cellulose, mycelium, and food-surplus biomaterials. Her work combines hands-on making with sensory and material inquiry, exploring the relationships between biological processes, material qualities, and design intentions. She is particularly interested in how working with living systems can open up new questions around ecology, care, material agency, and the entangled relations between matter, living systems, environments, and processes.
Paula has taught on the MA Biodesign since 2024, working across studio, laboratory, and workshop contexts. Her teaching encourages students to develop their own approaches to biodesign through experimentation, observation, cultivation, and making. She supports students in thinking critically about how they establish the conditions for living processes, while remaining responsive to the ways these processes can shape and challenge their design intentions.
Paula completed her PhD at the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment, where she investigated living textiles and human–microbial relationships. Her wider research has explored textile–microbial interactions, sensory materials, and experimental approaches to working with biological systems. Her current practice builds on this research, expanding towards questions of cultivation, uncertainty, care, and the ways design can engage with complex and interconnected material processes.
Alongside the MA Biodesign, Paula is an Academic and Artistic Associate at the Circular School, HfG Karlsruhe, where she works in the BioDesign Lab, studio, and field, exploring new forms of teaching and research.
Her practice spans research, installations, public engagement, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Paula is interested in developing biodesign as an attentive and experimental practice—one that combines deliberate design with an openness to material processes, interdependencies, and the possibilities they bring.