Born in Tokyo in 1962, Masayo Ave, a Japanese designer who has been settling in Europe for over three decades, embodies both cultural and disciplinary synthesis. As one of Japan's most intriguing design luminaries, she brings her expertise not only in her sensory-based innovative design works but also in the field of design education.

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She graduated in Architecture at Hosei University in Japan in the late 80s. Her illustrious design career began in the early 90s founding her design studio MasayoAve creation in Milan, where she completed a Master's degree in industrial design at Domus Academy. Taking a sensory and imaginative approach to basic design principles, her design practice and research focus on the artistic and scientific search for the sensorial value hidden in the material. Her innovative design projects, which reconcile handicraft tradition with cutting-edge technology, span various disciplines and cultural fields and brought her critical fame, receiving many international design awards, including ICFF 2000 Editors Award and the A&W Mentor Award 2006. 
 
Equally as illustrious as the praised carrier as a designer, Masayo Ave is one of the most prominent and influential designer-educators today. In the early 2000s, Masayo Ave started to be active in the field of design education, conducting many design workshops in the realm of sensory experience design pedagogy for university students, professional designers, and artisans in Europe and Asia. She has been appointed professor at several major European Universities, including the University of Arts in Berlin, where she founded an experimental design institute of Haptic Interface Design. Currently, she is a guest professor at Kanazawa Art College in Japan and ALUO at Ljubliana University in Slovenia. She has been serving as a jury member of prestigious international design competitions, including the Reddot design awards (Germany), Design Educates Awards (Poland) and D&AD awards (UK).
 
Since 2006, she also has been dedicating her career to developing new design education programs for children and youths that encompass a variety of sensory-based design experiences. She developed and conducted numerous programs, including MWOS-ManyWaysOfSeeing, under the commission of the DesignSingapore Council and a series of Sensory Experience Lab programs for children and youths to practice in the red dot design museum in the framework of the EU PROUD project.

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