Designer. Over a career that spanned nine decades she used glass and ceramics to turn everyday objects into works of art. Born Eva Amalia Striker to a family of wealth and position, she studied painting at Budapest's Royal Academy of Fine Arts but dropped out to apprentice with a pottery master under the old guild system. First exposed to what is now termed 'Art Deco' at a 1925 Paris exhibition she returned home and produced her initial commercial pieces some of which were shown at the 1926 Philadelphia Sesquicentennial. In 1928 she began work with Schramberger Majolikafabrik and quickly became well respected; a 1932 visit to Russia turned into a five year stay with her rising to a high position in the state-run china and glass industry. In May of 1936 she was arrested on suspicion of plotting to murder Stalin and held for 16 months, her prison experience forming the basis for her one time romantic interest Arthur Koestler's 1941 novel "Darkness at Noon". Expelled and deported to Vienna in November 1937 she met attorney Hans Zeisel (deceased 1992) but soon had to flee the Nazis; she and Zeisel escaped to London where they married and from whence they soon departed for the United States. Landing in New York in 1938 with little money she began teaching at the Pratt Institute while quickly finding a market for her designs. Asked to create a pattern for the Museum of Modern Art in 1942, Mrs. Zeisel received that institution's first one-woman exhibition in 1946. Over the years she produced her characteristic round pieces (she once remarked that she was round as was the air between her hands) for a multiplicity of museums and commercial firms. Essentially never retiring, she was still working as late as 2010. The subject of a 2003 biography by Lucie Young, she published "Eva Zeisel on Design" in 2004 and in 2005 received the Cooper-Hewett National Design Museum's Lifetime Achievement Award. Mrs. Zeisel was bestowed her native Hungary's two highest civilian awards and received multiple honorary doctorates. At her death from the effects of advanced age her work could be seen at a multitude of museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Germany's Brohan Museum, London's British and Victoria and Albert Museums, and the Smithsonian. Of her creations she said: "They're cold, they're hard, and we have to wash them. But paper plates will never bring a family together, or teach children to say, 'May I be excused?'. Obviously, it's a cultural need, and it's the designer who makes them festive".