Shula Ehrlich & Anke Stohlmann

Teaches at Playcrafting NYC

ABOUT SHULA
Shula Ehrlich is a designer and educator living in Brooklyn, New York. Her passions are around designing learning experiences that are rooted in play and design and empowering people to create positive changes at individual, community and global levels. She is also super passionate about fitness, running, food, and travel!

With an undergrad degree from NYU in Applied Psychology and Education and an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons The New School for Design, Shula has a unique and versatile skill set that includes: teaching and facilitation; graphic design and game design; and curriculum and program development.  At the heart of everything she does is creating playful learning experiences that encourage learners to take risks, fail safely, and ultimately learn through play and design. Shula worked as Lead Game Designer at Institute of Play for 5 years, where she collaborated with teachers to develop learning games and game-like curricula for 6th-12th grade classrooms and created and facilitated professional development workshops around game-based learning for teachers across the country.

Shula is currently an Instructional Designer on the Enterprise team at General Assembly, where she designs multi-day playful and design-based learning experiences that bring 21st century skills to company teams in topics such as digital marketing, digital product management, UX design, storytelling, and data insights.

ABOUT ANKE
Anke is a designer and strategist. Guided by human-centered design principles, she creates experiences that connect people and communities. Anke is passionate about education and design and strongly believes design thinking and play are needed in education to make learning fun again.
Earlier this year, Anke launched Li’l Stories, a literacy framework for elementary schools that teaches young children 21st century skills through storytelling. Human-centered design principles have guided the development of the various phases of the project—prototyping with kids and teachers and observing and listening to their needs—to create a framework that helps teachers and makes learning fun for students.

Anke is the principal and creative director of Li’l Robin, the multi-disciplinary studio she founded in 2005. Li’l Robin works at the intersection of print & digital, creating brand identity systems, publications, websites and mobile applications for clients including LIFE Books, Sterling Publishing, The New York Times, Pratt Institute and School of Visual Arts.

Anke studied Visual Communications at the Fachhochschule Düsseldorf, Germany, and holds a Masters Degree in Design Management from Pratt Institute in New York and a Masters Degree in Interaction Design from the School of Visual Arts. Before establishing Li’l Robin, Stohlmann held positions at several of New York’s leading agencies, including senior designer at Pentagram; creative director at Time Inc. Custom Publishing; founding art director at eDesign Magazine; and new media designer at Red Sky.