Christina Kim moved with her family to Los Angeles from Seoul, South Korea when she was fifteen. She studied painting and art history at the University of Washington, Seattle, under the mentorship of painter Jacob Lawrence.
In 1984, she founded dosa, a fashion and housewares brand based in Los Angeles, with her mother, a talented designer. Kim’s designs draw on traditional textile cultures from around the world, particularly India and Oaxaca, incorporating hand-crafted textiles and labor-intensive techniques. She works with local artisans, for whom she is able to provide sustainable livelihoods by engaging in long term, collaborative relationships and paying fair wages. “Our intent is to help keep different traditions alive…To this end the production process is more labor intensive than resource intensive. In this way, we are investing the human hand with more or as much value as the material itself.”
Over the past thirty years, Kim’s design process has evolved to include a system-wide approach to reuse and recycling, including using cutting-room waste to create new products. Widely recognized for her global and sustainable design practices, Kim was named by TIME Magazine as one of its Innovators of the Year in 2003 and received the “Innovation in Craft” Award by Aid to Artisans in 2006.