Anni Albers, born Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann (b. Berlin, German Empire, 1899 – d. 1994, Orange, USA) was a German-born American textile artist and printmaker credited with blurring the lines between traditional craft and art. Her mother was from a family in the publishing industry and her father was a furniture maker. Even in her childhood, she was intrigued by art and the visual world. From 1922, she studied at the Bauhaus at Weimar, but she struggled to find a workshop at the Bauhaus. Women were barred from certain disciplines taught at the school, and during her second year, unable to gain admission to a glass workshop, she deferred reluctantly to weaving, the only workshop available to women. She received her Bauhaus diploma for innovative work: her use of a new material, cellophane, to design a sound-absorbing and light-reflecting wallcovering. Albers, who was Jewish, moved with her husband and the Bauhaus to Berlin, but she then fled to North Carolina.
