Laura de Santillana

Glassmaker Laura de Santillana lives and works on the Giudecca Island in Venice.
She was born in Venice in 1955 into a glass dynasty; her grandfather Paolo Venini founded the Venini & C. company and her father ran it until there was a hostile takeover.

The collaboration with Venini, born in 1976, will last until 1985.
Her works have won many prizes and awards and are present in the most important museums in the worl d .
Glass is in their blood. "We love the material. We are stuck with this love. It is like Jacob and the angel."

She spend her adolescente in Venice after classical studies and the first year of architecture at IVAV The destination is New York where Laura is trained at the School of Visual Arts and in the studio of Massimo and Lella Vignelli. When he returns to Venice he dedicates five years, with his father Ludovico Diaz de Santillana and his brother Alessandro , to the family business, Venini, the brand-emblem of the best Italian tradition in the segment of artistic design glass. Until 1985, the year of the painful sale of the company and the turning point. So he re-enters the States. First in New York, at the Urban Glass, and then in Seattle, in another research center, she experiments with innovative techniques different from the traditional ones of hand-blown glass in Murano.

"Of course, glass is a familiar material, I know it well, it was in my life as a child. I think in glass. I am interested, however, in doing things that in a certain sense force its nature, looking for new formal and chromatic solutions ”, she explains. "When I think of a project I always look around to find the best place to make it: from the United States to Murano, to Bohemia." says for the Intermagazine.it online magazine