Han-Ah Yoo is a fashion designer and researcher interested in how design can have a favorable influence on society. She deals with environmental and social issues using design and scholarly works. Her artworks include traditional techniques (artistic sensibility, textile, painting, printmaking, etc.) to the latest technologies (3D and virtual design). She has received honors from juried exhibitions in Wisconsin, Illinois, Tennessee, and South Korea. Her research studies focus on digital fashion design, the virtual fashion industry, sustainable fashion, and apparel pedagogy. She believes her design and research works collaborating with other artists, researchers, and organizations can positively impact society by evoking stories from the fast fashion industry, seeking new ways to articulate the complexity of the fashion industry, and engaging communities in caring for the relationship between the environment and society. She also welcomes sharing her achievements with the next generation in the design field.
She is currently in a PhD program in the Department of Consumer and Design Sciences at Auburn University, USA. She got her MFA in Apparel Design from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, BA in Printmaking at the University of Mississippi, and AA in Fashion Design from South Korea. Before pursuing a PhD, she explored many paths, including a fashion designer, an art educator, and an exhibition manager.
She was born in a village surrounded by mountains, grass fields, and streams. Her artistic sensibility was developed by the colorful sights, various auditory, olfactory, and tactile elements from nature. She has explored her design experience under her mother, an educator, and jewelry artist. Fallen leaves, flowers, rocks, beads, fabrics, and leftover leather were her friends. She enjoyed watching how the materials were manipulated, created harmony, and finally became a new form next to her mother.
Seventy years ago, the church where her grandfather and father both worked as a pastor and an educator began with the support of the US army. For that reason, harmony, serving, and sharing has been the most important value of her family, and these became her design and teaching philosophy.