BERTHA JENKINS serves as a Apparel Design consultant to several designers throughout the United States and as an adjunct Assistant Professor at Georgia State University and the Art Institute of Atlanta, Georgia. Her area of concentration and passion is fashion design and fiber art. She has made a career in teaching and designing one-of-a-kind wearable and non-wearable art, incorporating fabrics and other manmade and natural mediums. Bertha received both her Bachelors and Masters of Science from Florida State University in Clothing, Textiles, & Merchandising and Apparel Design & Technology. She holds a MFA in Studio Art with a concentration in Textiles from Georgia State University.

• Presently she maintains and develops vendor relationships overseas to ensure key partnerships for future growth.
• She develops sourcing strategies based on 2-year plans
• She visits factories base overseas to assess capability and capacity to work on product standards and line planning.
• She prepares specification and cost packages for clothing designs.
• She consults with lead designers to achieve accurate specifications of designs before final sketch completion.

Bertha received 1st place in the Dallas International Career design competition in March 1999. The preceding year, Bertha placed second in the Dallas Career Day competition. She was the first student from Florida State University to ever place in the competition.

Among her other artistic achievements, Bertha received an award for Best in Show and Designer of the Year from Florida State University Fashion, Inc. in 1998 and 1999, respectively. Also receiving the Florida State Undergraduate Research Design Award in 1998, the first student in her department to receive this prestigious award, she was honored soon after by the Florida State University College of Human Sciences with a Graduate Assistantship from August of 1999 to April of 2001. In 2001, Florida State University also honored Bertha with the Leslie Wilson Graduate Scholarship before seeing her move on to a Graduate Assistantship at Georgia State University from 2004 to 2006.

Her designs and work has been exhibited at the Lynn Harris Gallery, at the Director Robert Townsend Appreciation Dinner and Reception at Georgia State University, and more recently (2008) at the Swan Coach House gallery of Atlanta, Georgia. In 2006 Bertha traveled to the Kuwansa Gallery in Ghana, Africa to exhibit some of her pieces and to conduct a fiber art seminar for students at the University of Ghana.

craft interests: sewing, Fiber Art - Wearable Art

my personal website:
http://berthajenkins.com

Gender: Female

Member Since: 12/01/2008