Designer Juliana Sissons to teach at NTU School of Art

Juliana’s diverse fashion career has included pattern cutting and designing knitwear for Alexander McQueen and Shelley Fox, tailoring for Hewitts at Saville Row and costume designing for the BBC.

She was also designer in residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum where her work is currently being displayed as part of the museum’s temporary exhibition ‘Club to Catwalk’: London Fashion in the 1980s.

Her academic career has seen her tutor pattern cutting and design at the University of Brighton, as well as providing master classes to various colleges and universities across the world.

Juliana will be joining Nottingham Trent University’s highly regarded fashion knitwear design and knitted textiles course as a fashion knitwear lecturer. Her background in pattern cutting and 3D knit will further encourage students to engage with conceptual knitwear as well as focusing on shape and silhouette. Juliana’s experience in the fashion industry will also help to enhance the fashion focus of this successful course.

Her current research explores how pattern cutters and cosmetic surgeons can transfer and exchange skills and techniques to better their practices, for example, understanding how to create better cuts for darts on both fabric and skin.

Juliana said: “I’m excited to be joining the fashion, textiles and knitwear department at Nottingham Trent University. The fashion knitwear and knitted textile courses at degree and masters level are well known for the design and technical exploration, access to fantastic resources and staff expertise and global industry links and collaborations.

“The knitting industry is an exciting place to be at the moment, as it’s constantly changing and evolving. The introduction of modern machinery and smart yarns means that there are vast new design possibilities.

“I really enjoy sharing skills and developing others so taking my career in this direction feels like a natural progression. I’m really looking forward to being able to help guide the designers of the future and advancing my own research.

Nottingham Trent University’s knitwear course is globally renowned in the fashion industry. The university was the only academic institution to have a stand at SPINEXPO, one of the largest international fairs for fibres, yarns and knitwear held in Shanghai, China.

In recent years the undergraduate course has regularly produced winners of the prestigious Stuart Peters Visionary Knitwear Award, which is presented at Graduate Fashion Week.

Nottingham Trent University