Ornament comes from the Greek word for Cosmos. Ornatista is an Italian word meaning the one who designs ornament.

We are a studio that takes the ornament design process as a jumping off point for a creative collaboration that merges structure with strategy and vision with reality. We educate, facilitate, and design solutions to bridge the relationship between the body, the building, and the cosmos.

Studio: Hunter’s Point Shipyard, BLDG 116 Studio 7b, SF, CA
Email:  jkd@ornatista.com

Bio

Jessica Kung Dreyfus compassionately challenges leaders to ground themselves and their organizations in what it means to be human. To this end, Jessica has traveled the world creating opportunities for change through her art, design, consulting, and coaching practice. She is passionate about the power of art and architecture to remind us of our human scale in the face of rapidly scaling technologies that are reorienting our relationship to the world.

As an interdisciplinary artist, Jessica has exhibited her artwork at museums and galleries around the world. She has shown her work at Centrale Montemartini in Rome, the De Young in San Francisco, and her work is held in private collections in New York, Shanghai, Rome, and San Francisco.

Jessica is a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture and influenced by the practice of architectural ornament as taught by Kent Bloomer. After graduation, Jessica worked as a designer at Bloomer Studio and over the past decade has continued to collaborate with Bloomer Studio on projects around the world.

Jessica’s unique approach to the creative process is also strongly influenced by her 15 years of training in meditation and her 450 day silent meditation retreat with her husband Stéphane Dreyfus. From 2010-2012, in prolonged periods of stillness, she learned to listen. Through listening, she came to experience the world as a site for creative intervention. As she re-emerged into the world, her engagement became informed by her unique experiences and realizations in stillness.

As she began to practice and teach again in 2013, she rediscovered the ornament design process as a process of educating humanity in being human through the physicality of spatial and aesthetic experience. She experienced how ornament facilitates the state of presence and belonging through intentional design. She realized how through the creative process, buildings and their inhabitants developed a greater connection to their purpose. She then found her purpose as one who can facilitate a direct channel to the discovery of purpose through process.

She is also the founder of Triveni and Yogis at Yale. She serves as a board member of Bandaloop.
She has an M.F.A. from California College of the Arts and a B.A. in Architecture cum laude from Yale University.