Maddie Duda (born in the Metro-Detroit area, 2003) is a Detroit-based multimedia artist. She is currently in her senior year at the College for Creative Studies studying Fiber & Textiles.

She has been creative since the start, and spent some of her earliest years drawing pictures of rainbows, cakes, and princesses and covering them in glitter. She learned to sew and crochet from both of her grandmothers around age 8, and got her first hand-me-down sewing machine at 11. Throughout her childhood, she was a dancer, finding a love for ballet, costume, and theatrical aesthetics that only grew following a childhood full of playing dress up. When she started high school, she quit dance to focus on art as her main hobby, teaching herself to paint with acrylic paints and learning to use oil paints during her junior year at CCS. At the beginning of June 2024, she began working at the Parade Company as an intern, and was officially hired as their “Big Head Doctor” at the end of July, repairing and overseeing their collection of over 300 paper mâché “Big Heads”. 

Maddie Duda explores a variety of techniques including painting (with both oil and acrylic paints), sculpture, and sewing in the form of soft sculpture, tapestry, and garment-making. She has always been a deeply nostalgic person, always retelling stories from childhood or sharing childhood photos and videos. Her work is maximalist and theatrical, drawing inspiration from her love for dolls, playing dress up, or old ballet costumes. Her work has been described as “cloying”, or sickeningly sweet, utilizing baby pink fabrics and paint, lace, and ribbons that contrast next to faded greens, golds, or neutrals, and fading, deteriorating lace patterns. Her palette and material choices offer a sense of bittersweetness, reflecting on her own emotions towards childhood nostalgia and girlhood. She is interested in representing both physical material memory and a sense of implied memory through different arrangements of materials; these materials include the use of childhood trinkets, along with second-hand found objects, fabrics, and embellishments. She enjoys exploring ways that painting and textile-based works can exist both in their separate worlds or together in a single piece, exploring each medium in varying amounts with each new piece (and sometimes blending all into one). With touches of glitter and a strong emphasis on color and material choices, her work strives to represent the abstractness and fluidness of memory in a physical form.