Irina Shapiro (RU/NL) is a designer, educator and curator. Her practice combines investigative artistic projects with educational events and research programmes that are often developed in collaboration with communities and organisations. Trained as a designer and scenographer, she sees pedagogy as her current dominant medium of practice and as a space for public engagement. Her educational work explores situational, participatory and sensorial qualities of applied arts. Shapiro’s research themes focus on pedagogical, artistic and storytelling approaches that act within multiscale, multi-species environments and open up inter-relational forms of knowing. Shapiro is a co-initiator of Open Set, an alternative platform for art/design research and development; a core tutor of the MA Education in Arts programme at the Piet Zwart Institute; a tutor of the New Earth course, Social Practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy; and a researcher at the RASL (Rotterdam Arts & Sciences Lab).