Kari Love

Kari Love is an artist in Brooklyn, NY who designs soft robots made from silicon and fabric rather than traditional materials. Her Spider-Man costume for Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution.

Kari Love spent two decades exploring motion through Broadway costume design and puppetry before bringing inanimate objects to life as soft robots. Soft robots are made from silicon, air-tight fabric, or biomaterial rather than metal or plastic. Her Spider-Man costume for Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark was inducted into the Smithsonian collection. She has designed puppets for Sesame Street and co-wrote "Soft Robotics: A DIY Introduction to Squishy, Stretchy, and Flexible Robots" for O'Reilly. Her current work includes prototyping an edible candy soft robot and exploring a burlesque performance with a research robotic arm, united by invitations to play and joy while engaging assumptions about gender and technology.