Sophia Taillet
About the Resident
French Resident
Mid April – Mid June 2026
Artist and designer
Sophia Taillet is a French artist-designer, a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York.
At the crossroads of art, design, and craftsmanship, her practice explores how material and gesture can translate movement into form. Through her objects and installations, she creates poetic dialogues between motion, sound, and matter.
She works with a wide range of savoir-faire — from traditional glassblowing to experimental uses of industrial techniques — transforming mechanical elements into poetic design forms. She collaborates with artisans, dancers, composers, and industrial partners, developing projects that merge technical experimentation with sensory experience.
As part of Villa Albertine residency program, with the support of Bettencourt Schueller Foundation
Her work has been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, the Fondation Pernod Ricard, the Versailles Architecture Biennale, Milan Design Week, and Maison & Objet. Her Vénus blown-glass light fixture has entered the collection of the Mobilier National.
A recipient of the Mondes Nouveaux grant — a one-year grant program initiated by the French Ministry of Culture — she has developed a transdisciplinary approach combining design, choreography, and sound. One of these research paths led to Spinning Around, an installation and performance presented at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature during Paris Design Week, developed in parallel with an exclusive collection for the Grand Palais boutique.
In 2026, as a Villa Albertine resident in New York, Sophia Taillet will continue her exploration of movement and form within the urban environment, observing the city as a living organism in motion.
Residency Project
Sophia Taillet’s recent projects — Time Erosion (Fondation Pernod Ricard) and Spinning Around (Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, in collaboration with a dancer) — explore the relationship between form, gesture, and environment through processes of slow transformation and circular movement.
These experiences marked a key evolution in her practice, where movement, material, and gesture have become the foundations of a choreographic design at the intersection of visual creation and performance.
Her residency in New York, in partnership with WantedDesign, extends this research into an urban, rhythmic, and sensory dimension. There, Sophia Taillet will explore the dialogue between object, gesture, and urban fragments, observing the city as a living organism in motion, traversed by visual, sound, and human flows.
Echoing Steve Reich’s City Life, she offers a sensitive reading of the city’s dynamics, translating its rhythms, tensions, and energies into forms, materials, and choreographic gestures. This immersion will begin with a phase of observation and collection — of sounds, textures, architectural traces, and everyday gestures — that will inform the creation of a series of objects and installations born from encounters and collaborations with New York–based artisans and creative studios.
Entitled City in Motion, the project proposes a poetic approach to design, where creation emerges from movement and embodied experience, and where urbanity becomes both a source of inspiration and a field of experimentation.