Mia Cullin studied interior architecture at Accademia Moda e Design in Firenze, Italy from 1991-1992 after which she studied architecture and furniture design at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm from 1993-1998. In 1996 she obtained a scholarship from Nordplus to study one year at the Institute of Spatial and Furniture Design, at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design.
After completed her studies Cullin founded her own design studio from where she works with interior architecture to furniture, textiles and lighting design. Among her clients are Swedish companies such as Materia, Zero, Nola, IKEA, Gemla, Blå Station, Verk and NC Nordic Care. Cullin has also worked with Finnish companies such as Adea and Woodnotes. Her design is often a combination of traditional crafts, material and construction with geometric shapes.
The Orkester collection for NC Nordic Care in 2018 is a bench inspired by traditional piano stools and their adjustable seats made of solid wood. Orkester is made with a single, double or triple seat. For Adea Cullin designed the chair Fay with a frame made of ash wood and a braided seat of leather. For Fay Cullin took her inspiration from belts and bags from the seventies.
As an interior architect Cullin has worked with public spaces such as Queen Silvia’s Pavilion at Ulriksdal's Castle in Stockholm (finished in 2007) as well as exhibitions for companies and museums. In 2015 she made the installation Himlavalv (eng. sky vault) together with Marie-Louise Hellgren at the Asian restaurant Berns during the Stockholm Design Week.
In 2007 Cullin received the Interior Innovation Award in Cologne for the exhibition Flake for Woodnotes and in 2019 she was awarded the Elle Decoration Swedish Design Awards for the Kapten shelf for Gemla.
In 2020 Cullin was a part of the The Kinship Method project together with Margot Barolo, Andreas Nobel, Erik Björk and Fredrik Paulsen. The project examined methods in design production and started with each designer making their own chair, that was infiltrated by each other’s shapes in the following two steps. Each chair then moved on to the next designer, who in turn had to use 20-40% of the chair’s form elements for a new chair, done under time pressure and with no insight in what the others were doing. The Kinship Method resulted in fifteen chairs in three generations, that where each followed by a group discussion with the focus on how the project mattered to question the structure within design production.
Mia Cullin´s Fay chair was a part of the Female Traces exhibition at the Museum of Furniture Studies in 2019/2020.
