Eia Radosavljevic
Poetry
Chicago, IL
Eia Radosavljevic’s career in the arts and art education is a nonlinear excursion through dance, fiber art and writing as methods of creating and questioning. A child of WWII refugees, Eia’s first art education was at home with her mother, followed by Junior School classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—first prize for winning a city-wide competition. After high school, she danced professionally in Chicago, New York, Tokyo, Madrid, Las Vegas and Boston. Upon her terpsichorean retirement she followed another love––studying millinery design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and subsequently launching Eia Millinery Design.
Eia returned to Chicago, coming full-circle at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago when invited to join the faculty as an expert in her design field, where she continues to teach today. Having earned her BFA and MFA degrees from SAIC, Eia has exhibited and instructed internationally, as a repeat instructor at the International Millinery Forum in Australia and frequent guest artist-educator at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn.
In 2024, Eia was awarded a Fulbright Specialist Grant, received promotion at SAIC to Full Professor, Adj., was granted an art residency in North Carolina, exhibited her sculptures at Ruschwoman Gallery in Chicago, and was commissioned to create a work included in the 2025 exhibition Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Regarding her work, Eia states, “A fundamental methodology of my practice is the artistic research of lived and inherited experience. Whether hung on a wall, worn on a head, or written on a page, my works function as abstract indicators of experiential genealogy. Working with felt in recent sculptures interfaces traditions of fine handwork with the ‘unfinished’—the latter appearing as an arrested moment rather than a state of incompleteness—in response to altered physical abilities. The process of hand-making remains paramount because it is through tactile manipulation of materials that I get a Proustian sense of the unknown or previously unseen revealing as recognized.”