Nicoleta and Ion Mitroi

From their home workshop in southern Romania, Nicoleta and Ion Mitroi work with dedication towards the revival of a ceramics style lost in history. A trained engineer, Nicoleta changed course when she first encountered Cucuteni-Trypillia pottery in a museum and fell under the spell of its raw beauty and symbolic charge. Her husband Ion, a graduate of the ceramics department at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, also embraced the style and together they have been shaping, now for decades, every piece without a wheel, working either as faithful replicas of excavated vessels or as personal interpretations of the same visual language. Beyond the workshop, they run demonstration classes, summer workshops, and traditional-craft circles in museums and schools, making the Cucuteni-Trypillia and Gumelnița heritage visible to a wider public.