Faculty

Profile

Jonsara Ruth is a designer, artist and Design Director at Healthy Materials Lab. She is Founding Director of the progressive MFA Interior Design program at Parsons School of Design. Charged with provoking change in the field, she lead AFTERTASTE, an annual symposium drawing from expansive and speculative perspectives from a wide spectrum of disciplines to bring new definition to the field of interiors. In her teaching, she draws from practices at both their cutting edges and their ancestral roots to inform design approaches. Her ideas about designing interior environments focus on exploring and understanding human experience. As a designer she is committed to using materials and processes that maximize worker, end-user and planetary health. Currently Jonsara leads Salty Labs, a collaborative design studio founded in sustainable thinking and testing experimental methodologies. Recently, Jonsara helped initiate a mission-based, for-profit company as director of design at Q Collection + Q Collection Junior. There she enlisted American manufacturers to combine historical quality craftsmanship with materials and manufacturing processes that eliminate risks to human health and the environment. Previously she was the first lead designer for the Martha Stewart Signature Furniture Collection. In earlier years, she apprenticed with several influential artists and designers. Her work is seen in hundreds of retail venues, thousands of homes, exhibited in galleries and museums, featured in publications internationally, and has received multiple awards. Jonsara is a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, received a Masters of Architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Industrial Design from Rhode Island School of Design.