Cristina Gabriele

Cristina Gabriele is a communications designer, psychosomatic practitioner, Gestalt psychotherapist in training, educator, and researcher with over 18 years of experience in the design industry. Her interdisciplinary practice moves across communications design, psychosomatics, pedagogy, and performance as research, using embodied inquiry, intuitive making, material engagement, repetition, and durational practice to investigate psychological and somatic processes through lived and embodied time.

She is the founder of MESSWORK, a psychosomatic design practice facilitating personal transformation and practice-building through individual sessions, group work, workshops, and intensives. Through trauma-informed methodologies and embodied, intuitive forms of inquiry, MESSWORK supports individuals, creatives, and practitioners in integrating embodied knowledge across personal, creative, and professional life.

Cristina also runs Cg Studio, a multidisciplinary design practice specialising in value centred brand strategy, identity systems, and art direction, working across arts, design, and culture.

Cristina teaches Graduate Communications Design, where she serves as Thesis Affinity Lead for Thesis I and II and sits on the Department Curriculum Committee. Alongside Chairperson Gaia Hwang, she co-founded the Other Islands Book Fair, which she now co-organises with Hwang and colleague Munus Shih. Together, they bring graduate Thesis work into dialogue with independent publishing, design, and broader practices of knowledge generation and circulation.

In Spring 2024, Cristina co-founded and launched the Faculty Personal Transformation Program through the Center for Teaching and Learning, extending MESSWORK’s principles, methods, and practices into faculty development.

Across her work, Cristina investigates the intersections of psychosomatics and design, performance and embodied research, and rehabilitative and intuitive approaches to visual communication. Her performance-based research uses durational practice, spatial installation, gesture, repetition, and material encounter to investigate psychological and somatic experience, asking how sustained embodied processes can generate tacit knowledge and make otherwise internal or intangible states perceptible through form.

Her practice has included collaborations with Google, Hulu, Oscar de la Renta, Harper’s Bazaar, L’Officiel Germany, CR Fashion Book, Frog Design, Invista, Cassils, and the Park Avenue Armory, and extends across communications design, performance, entrepreneurship, and invention; she is also the holder of a U.S. utility patent. Cristina was a founding member and designer of the Manufacture New York, pilot program, a made-in-NYC manufacturing initiative launched under Mayor Bill de Blasio to support local garment production and innovation.

Cristina previously founded the contemporary jewellery label Heart & Noble and ACME, a women’s initiative focused on navigating collective spaces and institutions—earlier bodies of work reflecting her ongoing engagement with transformation, systems, materiality, and relational practice.

MFA, Communications Design, Pratt Institute
BA, Psychology and Business, Northeastern University