Abrima Erwiah is Founder, alongside actor Rosario Dawson, of Studio One Eighty Nine, an artisanal fashion lifestyle brand and social enterprise that is a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund recipient and a CFDA + Lexus* Sustainable Fashion Initiative winner. She also serves as the inaugural Director of the Joseph and Gail Gromek Institute for Fashion Business at Parsons School of Design, in addition to being a part-time lecturer.
 
Ms. Erwiah is a luxury goods and fashion industry executive with extensive experience in sustainable development. She is Founder of Fashion Our Future, an organization she developed with designers, including Virgil Abloh, which uses the power of fashion to engage underrepresented communities in the political process. She has collaborated with brands such as Nike, J.Crew, Warby Parker, Edun/LVMH, Bergdorf Goodman, Yahoo, and more. Her design work was featured at the African Fashion exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and in the Sustainable Thinking exhibition at the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum in Florence and the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Ms. Erwiah, who believes that fashion can be an agent of social change, is an advisor to companies and organizations, including UN WIPO, Kering Foundation for Women's Dignity & Rights, CFDA Inclusive by Design, Gucci Changemaker, among others. 
 
She is a published author and has received numerous awards, including the prestigious FIT Changemaker Award; the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s Emerging Designer Award; and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award from the University of Pennsylvania.
 
Ms. Erwiah developed a master's degree at the New York University Gallatin School, where she studied the economic impact of luxury goods in Africa, and holds a bachelor of science in finance and international business from NYU Stern School of Business.