Paloma Powers and her international associates in New York, Los Angeles, and Shanghai are on a mission to reclaim the quality, endurance, and subversiveness that has been steadily sacrificed to cultural ubiquity.  Her team is dedicated to the highest standards of aesthetics for a purposeful life with artists at the helm of designing solutions for the home, the office, the retail space, the public space, the screen, and every surface of contemporary life.  

Paloma Powers (née Paloma Li Cruz) is a Brazilian born polymath who has lived in nine different countries with over 25 years of experience as a founding member of an online auction house, a curator of exhibitions across four continents, a producer of films and programming across art, film, and design, and a perennial style icon. 

Paloma Powers commissioned Shawn Maximo to realize her dream office where she elevates the everyday and invents new audiences for the unexpected.  The space is conceived as an oval, a vagina, an opening into another dimension where all of her passions are engaged. Maximo considered her attraction to water and appreciation of all things fluid when creating her wall-size aquarium.  She is obsessed with tardigrades, microscopic animals that have survived every major earth trauma, yet maintain a blissful co-existence with the planet.  They are extremophiles.

She prefers the most vital, aesthetic, and extreme elements of life.  Tortoise shell (the finishing for her walking treadmill desk), humanely harvested leoporah skin (her cheetah-leopard hybrid rug), ancient turquoise (the sacred stones in her aquarium), crisp rose wine (Paloma's personal vintage), chrome-plated ATM (dispensing 7 currencies including Bitcoin), and art (a marble figure by Jacques Louis David on her desk, Michael Snow's Woman Walking silhouetted in her wall); all are emblematic of her world. She is wonderfully complicated and unapologetic.

"The Office of Paloma Powers"
by Shawn Maximo (2014)

Andrea Hill is a New York based creative director and curator with expertise in art sales, luxury marketing, and leveraging technology for innovative retail strategies. She was a founding team member of Paddle8, an online auction house connecting buyers and sellers of contemporary art, and served as the company’s creative lead on content partnerships with Visionaire, Tumblr, and Interview Magazine. She managed gallery relations for Paddle8’s 300 + vendors and art fair partnerships with The Armory Show, ARCO, and NADA. She previously worked in the Private Sales and Private Collections departments at Phillips auction house. In addition, she has consulted for retail design manufacturers in China and the US.

Samantha Culp is a Los Angeles based consultant and creative producer with deep experience in cultivating emerging talent, cross-cultural research, and branded content with a particular focus on Asia. She has spent the past nine years in greater China where she worked at the intersection of art, media, and youth culture. Her research and analysis have appeared in publications such as Artforum, WSJ, and as a trend analyst/forecaster for London’s WGSN. From 2010-2012, Wieden+Kennedy Shanghai invited her to be their first in-house talent scout, consulting on their creative network and curating programs to activate the office as a community hub. Other projects include producing a series of short films for Swire Hotels and a 10-part web series on young creatives in 10 Chinese cities for Converse, as well as co-curating and hosting the ADChina Forum for the inaugural Design Shanghai Fair.