International Women’s Day (March 8th 2026) is a day celebrating the strength, resilience, and achievements of women globally. It is a chance to reflect on the social, economic, cultural and political acomplisments of women. This year’s focus is clear: rights, justice and action for all women and girls.

“As women achieve power, the barriers will fall. As society sees what women can do, as women see what women can do, there will be more women out there doing things, and we’ll all be better off for it.”- Ruth Bader Ginsburg

We at Makerversity want to celebrate the wonderful members that we admire not only just on IWD but all year round. Here is just a selection and their inspiring achievements.

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Ola Zarko
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Ola is a London based maker, photographer, and designer with over 13 years of experience supporting cultural organisations and NGOs across Ukraine and other European countries. She contributed to an opera production recognised at the 2024 Royal Philharmonic Society Awards. Her work is rooted in human stories, capturing events, communities, and brand narratives with clarity and warmth. It is shaped by a long-standing interest in nomadism, migration, fluid identities, and the art of adaptation.

In the past year, Ola has stepped into entrepreneurship and physical design, developing a deeper relationship with craftsmanship and sustainable thinking. She is drawn to thoughtful materials, conscious consumption, and everyday rituals that quietly shape how we live: food, home, care for one another, and care for the planet.

She is the founder of Morselin, a thoughtfully designed bread station that makes daily routines more intentional. Starting with no sewing or woodworking experience, Ola taught herself through experimentation and iteration, shaping both the product and its brand from the ground up. For her, function and beauty are inseparable. Design should work brilliantly, feel good to use, and belong in real life.

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Panja Gobel

Panja is an artist and creative technologist whose research explores the intersection of emerging technology, identity, and ethics. Her current work investigates AI infrastructure and how the systems underpinning AI shape the human condition. With over twenty years of experience as an art director, she has led the creation of award winning immersive applications for commercial clients, museums, and arts institutions, and has served as a judge for the Digital Design category at D&AD.

Seeking a deeper critical and practical engagement with technology, she completed an MA in Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019. Her practice focuses on sensor driven augmented reality and electronic wearables, examining the boundaries between body, technology, and social space.

She is a member of the feminist art and music collective Chicks on Speed, contributing to academically funded performance projects through critical Snapchat filters, generative visuals, and live VJ performances at Ars Electronica (2020) and Muffatwerk (2022).

In 2021, she received an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) award to research the “Virtual Body,” exploring how embedded technologies shape social interaction. This work led to immersive artworks incorporating live brain data within critical world-building experiences, presented internationally and forming the basis of her current research into AI infrastructure during a residency with Conditions Studio. You can find out more about her work here.

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Mara Pezzotta

Working across product design, research, and speculative practice, Mara's work explores how objects mediate the relationship between social behaviour, cultural values, and the material world. Through both critical inquiry and industrial production, she investigates how design can reveal and challenge the systems that shape everyday life.

Since 2015 she has been part of the community at Makerversity, returning in 2017 to conduct research with designer Gianni Arduini on the speculative design project Controversial Design. The research examines how design engages with culturally sensitive domains such as Sex, Food, and Death. Within these areas, the project analyses how social behaviours influence and shape objects and artefacts, and how their use and consumption in turn influence society, exploring the taboos and challenges surrounding these themes and proposing ways to address them through design.

Since 2018 she has been working as a Product Designer at Chrome Cherry Design and Innovation, a design consultancy operating between the UK and the USA. With Chrome Cherry she has developed products across a wide range of industries worldwide, supporting ideas from early concept stages through to manufacturing and production. The studio’s approach embraces experimentation across materials, technologies, and processes, driven by the belief that no industrial process should be a limit to innovation. Find out more about Chrome Cherry here.

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Kerrie O'Leary

Kerrie O’Leary is an Irish computational artist working between Dublin and London whose practice translates environmental data into moving sculpture, pen-plotted drawings and immersive installations. Taking an unconventional route into the art world, she first studied Management Science and Information Systems at Trinity College Dublin, which forms the foundation of her data-driven approach, before returning to complete an MFA in Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Growing up on a peninsula and sailing competitively from a young age sparked a fascination with the rhythms of water that continues to shape her work. In the studio, Kerrie combines code with hands on making building mechanisms with motors, pulleys, sensors and custom electronics to physically animate datasets such as tides, flooding records and lunar cycles. These systems transform raw environmental information into flowing lines, kinetic movement and machine drawings, making invisible natural processes tangible.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including presentations at Somerset House and the V&A in London, New York Open Data Week, and exhibitions across Ireland and the UK. She is an artist-in-residence at Makerversity, Somerset House, and part of the EU Commission’s S+T+ARTS Aqua Motion residency, where she is visualising tidal data in Viana do Castelo, Portugal. Her work is currently on view in Dublin, Ireland and Bath, UK. You can find out more about Kerrie's work here.

Alex Park

Alex is founder & CEO of Biofonic, an early stage UK-based startup on a mission to accelerate regenerative and ecologically collaborative agriculture through scalable, continuous soil biome intelligence. Codesigned alongside UK farmers, Biofonic has developed patent pending acoustic soil sensors and machine learning models to monitor multiple factors of soil biome health, making the impact of soil management decisions (e.g. the use of chemicals or different cultivation techniques) on the living biome immediately known. By making the invisible visible, Biofonic can help growers understand how to optimize their most valuable natural asset in real time, saving costs, increasing yields, and reversing current rates of agriculturally-driven soil erosion to restore our most biodiverse and life-sustaining ecosystem on the planet.

Alex welcomes a diverse array of collaboration modalities across ecology, AI, art, and social and cultural dialogues, particularly from women and under-represented voices. You can find out more here.

Alex is also a designer, researcher and consultant who enjoys helping others extract meaningful, high-leverage insights to create impactful solutions and resonant ideas. She combines her 13+ years of prior professional experience working at the intersection of data, technology, and human behavior at companies like Google and Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google(x)) where she helped to develop features and products that have positively impacted billions of people around the world, bridging it with her hands on innovation work as a deep tech founder to drive clarity and creative confidence in rapidly shifting technological and social landscapes.

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Happy International Women's day to all the women in the Makerversity Community. We love the work you're doing!
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