Emma Margarita Erenst is a creative XR director, an interdisciplinary designer, illustrator, lecturer and creative culture entrepreneur who specialize in visual storytelling, narrative driven interactive design, phygital experiences, gamification and embodiment. Over the past 15 years she has been shifting between 3 different hats – a designer-illustrator, a researcher, and a lecturer. As a designer she has been working with theater and dance companies, directing immersive productions, designing costumes and interiors and illustrating for exhibitions and for stages. As a researcher, she has been working with startups and with academic labs, designing wearables, smart textiles, and digital fabrication tools. As a lecturer, she has been teaching courses about visual storytelling, data visualization, speculative, urban and textile design. Some of her past works include developing smart knitting needles that use a play & learn approach to preserve the cultural heritage of textile making and teach knitting; Another is developing a gamified AR experience that use wall murals, animation, and sound – to teach children empathy and about the history of Israel in the 50’s till 80’s through play; Designing the costumes for the award winning dance performance Transparent Borders, where she was able to create an optical illusion, making the two dancers on stage appear as part of the same body all throughout the dance; Directing an interactive virtual reality theater production. Emma is the winner of the Azrieli-Shenkar Future Talents Award (2015); a semi finalist of the international finals of the Creative Business Cup (2016); a runner up of the TAU Coller competition (2017); a winner of the Van Leer institution Generator program Award for her project Dada productions (2024). Emma is a graduate (cum laude) of both the Masters design and the Bachelor of visual communication degrees at Shenkar College, where her research and applied artistic projects focused on interaction design and storytelling techniques for spatial and wearable media.