Brooklyn-based artist Jackie Ansell grew up in the Midwest, in the kind of place where a bead shop is more than a weekend destination — it was the beginning of her own artistic journey making and selling pieces to wear. That innate instinct for finding beauty and creativity in the world followed her to Pratt Institute, and then — as instincts often do in New York — somewhere unexpected.
For nearly a decade she worked at Twitter, then Stripe — yet she never let go of her design instincts, working as part of the UX and product teams designing how people interact with objects, systems, and interfaces.
Going back to her roots, or in this case, beads, Ansell has returned to the art of jewelry making with the launch of her brand Hysteria Jewelry. Bringing together intangible emotions with intentional structure, Ansell’s work is inspired by historical references, using jewelry as a form of conceptual storytelling.
Hotbook: Tell us the story of Hysteria Jewelry — how did it start and what inspired its founding?
Jackie Ansell: Jewelry was always present in my life. From the magic of Saturday afternoons at the bead store when I was a child, to metalsmithing at Colgate and soldering my first pieces, to selling handmade pieces out of my apartment, it was the throughline I kept coming back to, that always grounded me.
I launched Hysteria in Fall 2025, but the real work started years earlier. I’d always made jewelry, but it wasn’t until I dug into the word “hysteria” and its history that I started envisioning an entire world rooted in the Victorian era — a time when the diagnosis of female hysteria was overt, rampant, and openly used against women. That history gave my sketches, which had always leaned vintage, an actual world to live in. I stopped designing individual pieces and started building a mythology — symbols, styling, a whole universe for what a new-age “hysterical woman” would look like, and what she’d refuse to apologize for. Everything was intentional.
Why name a jewelry brand Hysteria? What is the significance of reclaiming that word?
I named the brand hysteria as a playful reclamation of the phrase ‘female hysteria’. Throughout all phases of my life, I found myself coming back to this word and its quiet pervasiveness that colored the female experience, despite it supposedly being something of the past. When my sister was diagnosed with an illness that was quite literally diagnosed as Female Hysteria until the 80s, I found myself digging through historical archives, namely the Victorian era, when the diagnosis was everywhere. Jewelry and fashion was always a way that I expressed myself, and that’s naturally what I gravitated towards.
Naming the brand Hysteria was a deliberate provocation, and beyond my personal connection to the word, I’ve found is that no one is ever indifferent to it. I’ve had conversations with women across every age group and the range is fascinating. Some women hear the word and immediately connect it to something painful like being dismissed, having their emotions used against them. For others it’s almost reclaimed with humor, this knowing sarcasm like of course they called us hysterical. And then there are women who associate it with the most alive, most passionate, most luminous parts of themselves – the intensity that makes them who they are.
Everyone had something to say, many of which I could never have predicted. This is exactly what I wanted the brand to hold. Hysteria is supposed to be a conversation starter, a point of reflection and curiosity. The fact that it provokes a reaction at all, that nobody shrugs at it, tells me the name is doing its job.
Take us through your design process — where do you find inspiration, and how are the pieces made?
As a designer, I constantly pull references from different time periods, different styles, different cultures to create something familiar but new. The world is my archive. I pull from our collective history, our humanity; and what’s fascinating about hysteria specifically, is that it’s pervasive across every single era. There’s never been, and I believe never will be, a shortage of source material, of inspiration.
The Awakening collection specifically draws heavily from the Victorian era because that’s when the diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ was at its most suffocating, women were literally being physically confined, through corsets and chastity belts. And then you go further back and realize that there’s a completely different iteration of Hysteria from the ancient world; the word “Hysteria” itself comes from the Greek word for uterus. The pathologizing of women is ancient. There are endless places to draw from.
Once I conceptualize the designs, I sketch them and work with talented artisans to bring them to life. Many times I’ll bring in paper prototypes of how I want something to function or an example of a mechanism I find interesting. My craftsmen are located in Providence, Rhode Island and during the development phase of a collection, I take the train regularly to collaborate with them in person. I used to hand make jewelry and am familiar with many of the techniques, so we’ll frequently brainstorm together to figure out the best way to make something. I think that’s one of the best parts about having your production team close by.
What is your favorite piece from your collection, and why?
It’s like choosing a favorite child! So hard. If I had to choose, I’d say the Padlock of Ophelia. It’s a piece that I’ve been dreaming up for years and to see it come to fruition is truly such a treat. Everything about it is, in my eyes, perfect. Everything from the shape, which took four iterations to get the bulbous bottom right, to the lock mechanism that clicks when closed, the filigree design on the surface that has references to both the art nouveau time period and the Victorian era, to the actual weightiness of the piece. It’s all intentional, deliberate by design.
Before starting Hysteria, what was the first piece of jewelry that inspired you? What made it special?
I’d always been fascinated by cameo pieces. My mother and grandmother both collected them and I associated it with both elegance and womanhood. I always created stories for the faces that flanked the surfaces. Most recently, there was a vintage cameo on a trip to the Amalfi Coast that gave me the thought to modernize the cameo. It was the first one I’d seen that didn’t have a face on it, and was an Italian riddle. I loved the idea of making this very classic style playful and different.
Growing up in the Midwest and now living in New York — how have these two places shaped your vision as an artist, and how are they reflected in your work?
I’ve moved around a lot — grew up in the Midwest, spent almost a decade in California, and now I’m in Brooklyn. I think that’s shaped my style more than any single place could have. Every place left a different influence, so people tend to see different things in my work depending on what they bring to it. That’s part of why I’m drawn to contrast — pulling together elements that don’t obviously belong side by side, and finding the tension that makes them work anyway.
How do you use jewelry as a form of storytelling? What story are you trying to tell?
Jewelry has always been personal to me. It’s never just been about beauty – we reach for the piece we bought to mark a new chapter, to survive a hard one, or simply to remind ourselves of our own worth. With the charm necklace for example, I always describe it as wearing your stories around your neck. Every piece someone adds becomes a small artifact of a memory, a relationship, a chapter — and over time it turns into something closer to a wearable archive than an accessory.
For me, the story I’m trying to tell with Hysteria is about reclamation — taking symbols that were once about constraint and control and transforming them into a symbol of power and protection. “Hysteria” has meant something different in every era it’s touched — always shifting, but almost always used against women. For today, I want to take that word back. I want Hysteria to mean something good: being the most authentic version of yourself, without constraints.
