FABRICADEMY 2026–2027
Andrea Cesar
Strategic designer · Academic · Entrepreneur
About Me
Hi, I am Andrea Cesar, a strategic designer, academic, entrepreneur, wife, and mother of four boys. I love having ideas, trying them out, learning new things, and moving between different disciplines.
I was diagnosed with ADHD at 38, and it has been an incredible journey of getting to know myself better and understanding the way I learn, create, and connect ideas.
I believe we are all beta versions of ourselves, and that we must continue evolving, learning, and experimenting. I am here to do exactly that: learn and experiment.
I’m excited to see all the things we create during this Fabricademy!
My Path
I studied Textile Design a long time ago, and later completed a postgraduate degree in Strategic Design and Innovation. For the last 16 years, I have immersed myself in many different kinds of projects and entrepreneurship.
I started my own fashion brand, Macadamia, in 2010, designing custom party and bridal dresses. Since then, I have worked closely with a small sewing workshop, which has taught me a lot about making things, solving problems, and adapting when things don’t go as planned. During the pandemic, when weddings stopped and so did our production, we started making fabric face masks. What began as a way to keep the workshop and the seamstresses working turned into a small side business producing thousands of masks and later tote bags for a Mexican brand.
During those years, I also started QBT Consulting with a friend, where we worked on qualitative market research and training, mixing Design Thinking with business model development.
I have also been a university professor since 2013. In 2024, I became a full-time academic at Ibero CDMX, and since fall 2025 I have been the coordinator of the Sustainable Fashion and Textile undergraduate program. Teaching has become a very important part of who I am. I love learning from my students, experimenting, having ideas, and putting them to the test.
My personal life has also shaped many of the things I create. I got married in 2016, and in 2017 we unexpectedly became parents of spontaneous triplets. They were born extremely premature, and that experience led my mom and me to create Baby Hammock, a project designed to support babies during sensory stimulation and recovery. Three years later, our fourth son arrived.
In 2024, I wrote and illustrated a children’s book, and since then I have also been exploring a more artistic side of myself. My path has never been very linear, but I think that is exactly what has allowed me to move between fashion, design, business, education, motherhood, and now new forms of experimentation.
Why Fabricademy?
I have been passionate about circular fashion, sustainability, textiles, and technology for a long time. I don’t consider myself an expert in one specific subject, but more of a generalist, always curious about different things and how they can connect.
I want to deepen my skills, learn things that are completely new to me, and experiment with materials, biology, technology, and fabrication.
But I also want to use Fabricademy to explore my artistic side. I don’t necessarily want everything I create to be functional or to solve a specific problem. I want to give myself the freedom to experiment, follow questions and ideas, and see where they take me.
Previous Work
Inoscula
Inoscula explores human relationships as mirrors: connections that allow us to see ourselves through another person, but can also confront us and reveal things we had not seen before.
Its name comes from inosculation, a biological process in which roots or other plant tissues growing in contact can eventually fuse together — a metaphor for the ways relationships connect, transform, and become part of us.
Technology + programming: Arturo
Garment construction: my seamstress
Macadamia
Baby Hammock
Sector Macadamia
Bazar Ibero
I created Bazar Ibero because the university did not have a space to support its own emerging entrepreneurs. I organized, promoted, and curated it as a place where new brands could sell and showcase their work, later incorporating talks and conferences around design and entrepreneurship.
Lo Relativo
Research Interests
I am interested in exploring human relationships and the different kinds of connections we create throughout our lives: partnership, motherhood, family, friendship, and other forms of human connection.
I find it fascinating how these relationships shape us, confront us, change over time, and become part of who we are. I want to explore how these connections can become a starting point for design and artistic experimentation, and how they can make us reflect on what it means to be human in the age of AI.
Selected references
Three starting points for exploring how human relationships can become data, interaction and material experience.
PERSONAL DATA · INTIMACY · VISUALIZATION
Dear Data
A year-long exchange of hand-drawn personal data. It makes me think about data as an intimate language for understanding ourselves and another person.
PRESENCE · INTERACTION · MEMORY
Pulse Room
Heartbeats become light and accumulate as a temporary memory of the people who have occupied the space.
Looking Forward
For my final project, I want to continue exploring human relationships, this time starting from my own relationship with my husband.
We have almost ten years of WhatsApp conversations, beginning in 2016, the year we got married. I want to explore this archive through data analysis and use it as a way of looking back at a decade of our relationship.
Other questions I want to keep open: What does technology remember that we have forgotten? What do we remember that data cannot capture? Can ten years of everyday conversation become a material, textile, or physical artifact?
I don’t know where this will take me, but that’s the point.