Maddie Duda (born in the Metro-Detroit area, 2003) is a Detroit-based multimedia artist. She received her BFA with a focus in Fiber & Textiles from the College for Creative Studies in May of 2025.

She has been creative since the start, and spent some of her earliest years drawing pictures of rainbows, cakes, and princesses and covering them in glitter. She learned to sew and crochet from both of her grandmothers around age 8, and got her first hand-me-down sewing machine at 11. Throughout her childhood, she was a dancer, finding a love for ballet, costume, and theatrical aesthetics that only grew following a childhood full of playing dress up. When she started high school, she quit dance to focus on art as her main hobby. She finds herself emotionally connected to seemingly ordinary objects; baby dolls, missing socks, and broken plates. In college, choosing CCS’s Fiber & Textiles department was the perfect way to blend her interests in sewing and painting together, creating a middle ground between fashion design and fine art. At the beginning of June 2024, she began working at the Parade Company as a parade artist and the “Big Head doctor”, repairing and overseeing their collection of over 300 papier mâché “Big Heads”. 

Maddie Duda explores a variety of techniques including painting (with both oil and acrylic paints), sculpture, and sewing in the form of soft sculpture, tapestry, and garment-making. She has always been a deeply nostalgic person, often finding herself reminiscing or sharing childhood photos and videos. Her work is maximalist and theatrical, drawing inspiration from her love for dolls, playing dress up, and old ballet costumes. Her work has been described as “cloying”, or sickeningly sweet, utilizing baby pink fabrics and paint, lace, and ribbons that contrast next to faded hues and deteriorating lace patterns. Her palette and material choices offer a sense of bittersweetness, reflecting on emotions towards nostalgia for her own life, or times she didn’t experience firsthand that she can simply only admire. With touches of glitter and a strong emphasis on color and material choices, her work strives to represent the abstractness and fluidness of memory in a physical form.