Kari Love

Kari Setsuko Love is known most around NYC for costuming humans, puppets, and robots. With nearly 20 years of costuming experience for stage and screen, she specializes in solving novel problems. Her Spider-man costume for the Broadway production of "Spider-man: Turn Off The Dark" was inducted into the Smithsonian collection. As a puppet costumer she has worked on productions such as Sesame Street, Helpsters, Julie's Green Room, and Happytown Murders. She co-wrote the book "Soft Robotics: A DIY Introduction to Squishy, Stretchy, and Flexible Robots" for Make Media/O’Reilly, as well as an academic peer-reviewed publication on the topic of robots wearing functional dress, “What Robots Need From Clothing.” She worked with Final Frontier Design, a commercial space suit company, from 2013-2016 as Lead Patternmaker and Fabricator. In that role, Ms. Love worked as a technical expert on 3 NASA SBIR contracts, a Space Act Agreement, and a contract on Mechanical Counter-Pressure gloves.

Kari’s personal practice draws on her career-long grounding in fabrication, collaboration, and motion. Current work includes prototyping an entirely edible candy soft robot, and testing the feasibility of a burlesque performance starring a Kinova Gen 3 research robotic arm. These topics are united as invitations to play and towards joy, while engaging assumptions regarding gender and technology. She also intends to explore writing/publishing about Religious Robots as these robots confront us with the boundaries of personhood, and can provide insights of what that means for technology, spirituality, and society.