Anni Albers (Berlin, Germany, 1899 – Orange, Connecticut, 1994) was an artist, textile designer, printmaker, and educator, and remains one of the most influential textile artists of the twentieth century.

Albers studied painting privately with the German Impressionist Martin Brandenburg from 1916 to 1919 before enrolling at the Bauhaus in 1922, where the school assigned her, as it did most women, to the Weaving Workshop. There she met her future husband, Josef Albers, whom she married in 1925; she completed her diploma in 1930 and went on to lead the workshop. In 1933, Anni and Josef Albers immigrated to the United States and founded the art department at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Anni Albers built a curriculum that integrated weaving with industrial design.

Beginning in the 1930s, the Alberses made repeated trips to Mexico and South America, and Anni's deepening study of ancient Andean textiles, woven in cultures that had no written script and used pattern instead to carry meaning, reshaped her sense of what weaving could do. "Threads caught me, against my will," she later said of her own reluctant, lifelong devotion to the medium. In 1949, Albers became the first textile artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, a show that subsequently toured twenty-six museums across the United States and Canada. After moving to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1950, she turned increasingly to mass-reproducible fabric design for manufacturers such as Knoll, alongside writing and her "pictorial weavings." From 1963 until the end of her life, she devoted much of her practice to printmaking, often using highly experimental techniques.

In 1965, she published On Weaving, a seminal text that helped establish design as an academic field and a subject of aesthetic inquiry, and in 1981 she received a second American Craft Council Gold Medal for lifetime achievement. In 2018, Tate Modern mounted the first major UK retrospective of her work, drawing on major collections in the United States and Europe. Known for bringing unconventional, often industrial materials into textile art, and for a body of thinking as rigorous as her weaving, Anni Albers helped permanently redefine the boundary between the fine and applied arts.