About Dena While Dena is an artist first and foremost, she's also the hands-on head of Dena Designs, Inc., which grew from a notebook of sketches she showed to a licensing agent into a flourishing company. Dena works personally with her clients to design products such as stationery, wallpaper, fabrics, rugs, bedding, and dinnerware-anything, really, that can be enhanced by one of her playfully chic designs.Like many artists, Dena didn't plan on a career in product design. After graduating from UCLA with a degree in landscape architecture and industrial design, she moved to New York City. A newspaper ad led to a job with an agency that sold art to textile manufacturers. Soon a Dena-designed bedding collection was on the cover of a Bloomingdale's catalog, and Dena became recognized for the fresh, uncontrived fabric designs that set her work apart. Now, Dena lives and works in sunny California with her husband, Danny, and the Dena Designs crew. In the past 20 years, she has won 17 Louie Awards-the industry's highest honor-including a Greeting Card of the Year award. The Life of an Embellisher Dena's life-long passion for collecting old "bits and pieces" from flea markets and antique shops blossomed into a television show, Embellish This! on the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Network. "I never imagined myself on television," Dena says. "But it's great fun to talk to the viewers while I do my projects, and they seem to love joining in." They seem to love her project ideas as well. As Dena says, "Why spend $500 for a pair of designer shoes when you can create the same look with $9.95 sling-backs and some embellishments?" |