ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Michael G. LaFosse is best known as a paperfolding artist, one of the few who also makes his own handmade papers. He has enjoyed the art of origami since 1962, and has been teaching paperfolding and papermaking since 1972. LaFosse’s most popular works in handmade paper are of natural history subjects; in college, he studied biology as well as math and art. His work is shown in national and international museums and galleries, including the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona; and the Carousel du Louvre, Paris. He has toured five major cities in Japan with Master Akira Yoshizawa’s life retrospective origami exhibit.

Michael created a spectacular show of original origami natural history sculptures after an internship at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. Over 40,000 people viewed his works on display at their Ironwoods Gallery. In 2004, he studied plants and animals of the Florida Everglades in preparation for the 2005 exhibit “FLorigami” at the Morikami Japanese Museum and Gardens, Del Ray Beach, Florida. Some of the more unusual origami applications that have employed LaFosse’s talent include elaborately folded pastry and hors d’oeuvres, and custom-folded plastic components for clean rooms and earth orbiting satellites.

Richard L. Alexander was raised on a dairy farm in the rolling, forested hills near Ithaca, New York. Cornell University was an oasis, an exciting blend of engineers and artists, where both disciplines engaged in a healthy dialogue of review and critique. He put his Cornell Systems Ecology degree to work, consulting in factories to reduce waste and pollution while also improving lives and profits. He kept his hand in art and engineering by building an experimental airplane and designing his own passive solar home on the banks of the Merrimack River. Soon after, he met LaFosse and was intrigued by how his advanced origami beautifully blended art and engineering. They began helping each other with their respective careers. Richard’s background of developing and presenting training programs in industry involved extensive writing, photography and video production, and he brought these to their partnership.

The authors co-founded the Origamido Studio in 1996, a commercial design studio, origami classroom, hand papermaking facility and gallery displaying exquisite origami and paper arts from over 60 artists. Alexander has been the principal hand papermaker and workshop instructor at the studio since 2002. Together, LaFosse and Alexander have created dozens of origami exhibitions and over 70 books, kits and videos about paper and paper arts. They consult to engineers, teachers and artists, and design props for TV, print, web-based and tangible advertising.