Kesha Felipa (1987), born and raised in The Netherlands, graduated from AMFI (Amsterdam Fashion Institute) in 2009, ArtEZ Fashion Masters in 2012, Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Teacher’s training in visual arts in 2022 & master’s in art education (Fontys Academy of the Arts) in 2024. In 2022 she was nominated for the Jacques de Leeuw Award for the category Education and won it. The Award granted the winner with a €10.000 prize.

At the fashion related studies, she specialized in pop culture, youth cultures, trend forecasting and identity. After working at retailers as Junior Stylist she felt that she is too peculiar to work at large or conventional fashion companies. And as we live in a time of too much ado about nothing, Felipa is armed with her good and soft heart yet being a bit stubborn ;). Sometimes misunderstood, but most times convincing. 

In 2018 Felipa was toying with the idea to pursue a career in art education. When she was a teenager, she was shifting between different art studies, which one was the teacher’s training. In the end she chose fashion instead. As she had her namesake studio that didn’t took off and started to notice that there weren’t many people of color in the creative sector. That made her think back to her own studies where she didn’t hear a lot of stories of Black or artists of color.

Between 2018 and 2020 she wanted to save up financial resources for teacher’s training and wanted to finish a course Japanese in the meanwhile. In 2020 her temp job in logistics came to an end. And it felt like the perfect moment to apply for the teacher’s training Visual arts at Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Tilburg. A few weeks after the application, assessment and acceptance to the training George Floyd got murdered. In the wake of the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests AMFI and the rest of fashion industry got a large number of bad press about exclusion of students, models and employers of color. The feeling that something was off that Felipa had since she was studying at AMFI got confirmed.

During her teacher’s training and master’s in art education she combined her specializations from her fashion past (pop culture, youth cultures, trend forecasting and identity) with global perspective & indigenous knowledge. She taps into her cultural background (The Caribbean part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands) and society studies together. As art educator Felipa focuses on mbo (secondary vocational education) and hbo (university of applied sciences and art academy).

Currently she is part time advisor cultural education at Kunstloc Brabant in Tilburg, The Netherlands. Next to that is she in the progress to explore the role of visual artist. She isn’t available for client work regarding illustration, apparel graphics and graphic or fashion design.