Henrike Schmitz has been working at BURG in the Textile Design programme since 2023. Her teaching focuses on transformative, creative processes in the textile industry within a well-established network in and around Saxony. In her own phd research, she deals specifically with recycling methods and implementation strategies in knitted structures - designing with and on machines. Her conceptual work focuses on material situationships and regional production plaque in places with locally grown textile knowledge.

In 2024, she was elected to the design faculty council and the library committee and organises a public university jourfixe every semester, at which the artistic staff present their research practice in an attempt to diffuse it into teaching in the form of their qualification.

She studied textile and surface design at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee Berlin and at the Swedish Textile School in Borås. As a trained men's tailor, she worked for various fashion labels in Berlin. After her MA in design, she was a lecturer for various practical seminars within the cultural anthropology of textiles at the TU Dortmund. After working for three years as editorial manager in the textil trainer project at the TU Chemnitz, she was most recently employed as a process engineer at SOEX.