LILI TAYEFI
“CODE&CRAFT”
2025
Lili Yas Tayefi is an Iranian-Canadian designer, educator, and interdisciplinary artist based in Calgary. Her practice bridges contemporary design with ancestral material knowledge, centering clay as both medium and metaphor for transformation. Through a language of form that is intuitive, experimental, and deeply tactile, she creates sculptural vessels, lighting, and 3D-printed ceramics that explore the tension between precision and imperfection — where process becomes an act of storytelling.
Tayefi teaches and leads research in digital fabrication and ceramic design, integrating new technologies with the intimacy of hand-making. She recently launched a Grasshopper plug-in for clay 3D printing, called LYTcode, expanding accessibility to experimental workflows for artists and designers.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museu d’Història de Barcelona, Contemporary Calgary, and the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Connecticut, with ongoing collaborations between studios and institutions across Canada, Spain, and Iran. The work presented in Code + Craft emerged from Tayefi’s recent research-based course with Master of Architecture students at the University of Calgary, developed as a collective exploration of body, form, and digital fabrication in clay.
“Rooted in slow, storied living — where machine, matter, and meaning converge”
