Age 103 And Still Designing.

103 year old Eva Zeisel continues to astound. The Hungarian born designer just doesn't won't give up. In addition to being enormously talented, her life story is as interesting as her work.

She was born Eva Amalia Stricker on November 13th. At 17 years old she enrolled in the Royal Academy Of Fine Arts, with the dream of becoming a painter, however her mother convinced her to try a more profitable trade. Eva then began apprenticing as a potter. In 1925, she began her own pottery on her family estate. In 1927 she moved to Hamburg Germany, where she worked at Hansa Kunstkeramic for half a year.

In 1932, she visited Russia for the 1st time. She worked at the Lomonosov Manufactory designing dinnerware and at the Artistic Laboratory of the Lomonosov State Porcelain Factory (the former Imperial Porcelain Factory) in Leningrad.



By 1935 she was the artistic director of the Glass and China Industries in Moscow, Russia. Soon after, in 1936, the talented Stricker was falsely accused of being part of a conspiracy to kill Josef Stalin and imprisoned in Russia for 16 months, 12 of which were spent in solitary confinement.

Upon her 1937 release from prison (without explanation), she was put on a train to Vienna where she was met by relatives. In 1938 she married her second husband, Hans Zeisel in the UK(her first marriage was to physicist Alexander Weissberg and was dissolved). Soon after marrying Zeisel, they both moved to new York.

In 1939, she created the first department of ceramic arts industrial design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she taught until 1952.



She then went on to design iconic pieces for Chantal, Sears, Red Wing Pottery, Hall China Company, Watt Pottery, H. Heisey and more. Many of her vintage pieces can still be found at the Orange Chicken Gallery.

At the impressive age of 103, she is still actively designing. She has current collections of ceramics and silk-screened prints for Klein Reid, Classic Century ceramics and One O One earthenware for Royal Stafford, the re-issued Granit collection for Design Within Reach, pens, pen holder and card holder designs for Acme, hand blown glassware collections for Gumps , glassware, aluminum and more for Nambé, exclusive China pieces for various galleries, and a furniture line, and most recently a collection of three Tibetan wool rugs for The Rug Company.