A nurse weaves through life
In Linda Ruggiero’s hands, the processes, tools, and challenges she encounters in health care—and in life—become art.
Soon after nurse Linda Ruggiero, PhD, BSN, started working in the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center cardiac catheterization lab in 2023, she got to see stents up close during a training opportunity—when normally they are sheathed in sterile packaging right up until they are implanted in a patient.
Ruggiero stared at the intricately woven mesh tubes. Small enough to fit inside a palm, the devices are inserted into blocked arteries to improve blood flow. Ruggiero, a weaver and a fiber artist outside of work, saw the little pieces of metal and thought: They’re just so beautiful.
The nurse held back from asking if she could take one home. But Ruggiero knew she would recreate the stents in fiber. She perceived their power as art. Beyond being enamored with their physical structure, she was awed by the ability of a tiny piece of metal to have such a profound impact. And creatively, the stents also presented a device through which to explore her feelings around heartache and healing—both medical and emotional—in her patients and herself.
“I was really interested in this idea of something that was dead or broken being given a second chance and opening up,” she said.
She went on to make “Stenosis”: three two-foot-tall ropey tubes, made from cords woven through chicken wire, depicting a blood vessel in different stages of cardiovascular health after a stent is put in and blood flow is re-established. The term “stenosis” means the constriction of a passage or opening in the body, like a blood vessel.
In May, the piece was featured in the third annual art show at the Penn School of Nursing, where Ruggiero is pursuing her Family Nurse Practitioner degree, and where she also teaches health assessment skills to undergraduate nursing students. Before that, it was part of the 2025 Second Career Makers show at the Peters Valley School of Craft in New Jersey.
‘Woven Stories’
Weaving has carried Ruggiero through the darkest periods of grief and trauma. In June, Ruggiero’s first solo show, “Woven Stories,” at the DaVinci Art Alliance in South Philadelphia, featured tapestries she made to process her experiences as a critical care nurse; the difficulties of working through the COVID-19 pandemic; and the unexpected loss of her mother in 2024.
Her art reflects who Ruggiero is—deeply feeling, “wholly alive,” and “the most uncompartmentalized person I have ever met,” said one of her best friends, Kate Dorsch, PhD, associate director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at Penn.
“She's not a nurse and a weaver and a scientist. She's just Linda, inhabiting the world as her whole self,” Dorsch said. “Every single moment, every single second, she is fully alive, embodying and living every single part of herself—the good stuff, the bad stuff, the art, the nursing ... she is all of those things.”
A career change
Ruggiero, 47, worked as a neuroscience researcher for several years before she decided to become a nurse. The seeds were planted during her second postdoctoral fellowship, in which her research involved studying circadian rhythms in a dark room. Outside of work, she volunteered at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center doing arts and crafts with children. She watched the nurses hugging and playing with their young patients and was moved by the warmth of their interactions. Her research was interesting, but in the hospital, that “was the first time I was jealous of someone’s job.”
She went back to school when she was 40 and got her first nursing job in 2018, on a medical-surgical unit at Penn Presbyterian, which became a COVID unit during the pandemic. She later worked in the surgical intensive care unit at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania before moving back to Presbyterian to work in the cardiac cath lab, where patients undergo minimally invasive procedures to treat heart blockages, valve disease, or reduced heart function.
The same trait that helps her as an artist—her ability to feel all her emotions, without restrictions—benefits her as a nurse, too. She thinks families appreciate her down-to-earth, realistic tone, and compassion for patients who may come across as “difficult.” Ruggiero understands that fear and anxiety in patients can come out as anger—she saw that during her mother’s illness—and she doesn’t back away.
“It’s very rewarding when patients say that they were really scared, but I made it much better, or when families ask for me to be there,” she said. “That’s the best feeling in the world.”
Creativity in every chapter of life
Making art has always been a central part of Ruggiero’s life; she likens it to a compulsion, “something that’s in me—that I have to do.” Growing up on Long Island, she had a champion in her mother, a talented illustrator and painter who wanted to go to art school but was discouraged by her own parents. Ruggiero’s mother taught her to draw and always celebrated any kind of accolade she won for her artwork, “so that made me want to do more.”
In her early 20s, she started knitting as something to do on the bus. There was just something about yarn, the look and feel of it, that captivated her. Knitting remains a big part of her life: She’s a loyal member of the Philadelphia Drunken Knitwits, a group that meets weekly for knit-and-chat dinners and has made several public yarn installations.
Ruggiero also does collage, painting, and pottery—when she was studying retinal degeneration for her PhD in neuroscience, she made clay carvings of retinas for her thesis advisors—but weaving became her primary medium a few years ago. One of her teachers described it as “finger painting with fiber,” which spoke to her.
“It can be abstract and creative and playful, and that really attracted me,” she said. “It’s very free-form and expressive, but without having to use paint or something two-dimensional.”
Ruggiero loves how the fiber arts are so multifaceted—the way they can be useful, beautiful, and healing all at once, and how, whether she is knitting on the bus or mending a garment for a guest at Broad Street Love, a Philadelphia nonprofit serving those in deep poverty—can bring up a precious memory for the person watching.
“I’ll see a lot of people staring and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I always wanted to do that,’ or, ‘My grandmother used to do that,’” Ruggiero said. She will often extend an invitation to a weekly crafting meetup, where she’ll freely teach anyone who wants to learn. She also serves as the education director for the Philadelphia Guild of Hand Weavers, runs a Facebook group for fiber arts enthusiasts, Philly Fiber Flock, and leads weaving workshops around the Philadelphia area.
“She's known as both a talented artist and a really excellent administrator and leader in the fiber arts, both in Philadelphia and also in the region,” said Dorsch, who also knits. “She's an incredible resource and benefit to the community.”
Art and pain intersect
In her own creative practice, Ruggiero weaves to both process and represent painful emotions.
Her job gives her plenty to draw from. Many patients at Presbyterian come from a community facing profound social challenges that overlap with their health and well-being. Seeing so many people affected by poverty, gun violence, and drug use makes Ruggiero, a longtime Philadelphia resident, get emotionally charged about “how broken our city is.”
In the tapestries that comprise her “Critical Care” series, she used the heart to express her sadness over the social problems she feels powerless to fix.
“The heart is an easy metaphor, because ... when there are blockages, the whole body doesn’t work properly,” Ruggiero said. “It’s like our society: When you have a problem like gun violence or drug addiction or homelessness, it affects the whole community.”
The death of Ruggiero’s mother from heart failure in March 2024 precipitated a separate body of work. One piece, a series of three framed weavings entitled “Dilaudid: 0 mg, 0.2 mg, 0.4 mg,” represents her mother’s resistance, and then acceptance, of the pain medication in her final days. Ruggiero used yellow, her mother’s favorite color. The first one appears “disordered,” to represent when her mother was in pain but refusing medication. The final piece, with ordered rows, reflects her mother’s peaceful moments, when she was receiving comfort care and on the highest dose.
Sometimes, Ruggiero has a pretty clear idea of what she wants to make. Other times, she simply knows she wants to create a piece based on a particular feeling. She never thinks after finishing a piece, “This is really great.” But she loves the making part.
Weaving, she says, is a type of moving meditation, like yoga or tai chi or running. She loses track of time and isn’t focused on anything else.
“You don’t have to be still and quiet in order to meditate or to be mindful,” she said. “Whatever issues I go through in life, whether it be a breakup or the death of someone … I feel so much better when I’m weaving.”