David Clemons was born in El Paso, Texas and spent much of his life in Austin, Texas.  Initially he began his undergraduate career attending Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, pursuing a combined degree program for Biology Art and Pre-Med.  He attended the program for two years before returning to Austin to complete his BFA at the University of Texas in Austin, with a primary emphasis in painting. He earned his MFA in Metalsmithing in 2007 from San Diego State University. David taught in the art department at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, Arkansas for the 10 years. During 8 of those years he developed and headed the Metalsmithing and Jewelry Department. He presently lives and creates work in Penland, North Carolina. His work embraces the craft of Metalsmithing and it’s collected history of techniques and objects. The resulting works rendered in metal, mixed media, and hand made artist books are vehicles to communicate ideas surrounding identity and forays into material and process-based work.  He has work included in the collections of the Arkansas Art Center, National Ornamental Metal Museum, and the Yale Contemporary Crafty Collection.

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Dylan Neuwirth is a contemporary artist working with light, space, and interactive technologies. He has participated in numerous solo, group, and public art exhibitions as well as curatorial and digital projects. His work is in private and institutional collections, and has appeared on PBS, Creators, Artsy, New American Paintings, artnet, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Beautiful/Decay, WIRED, and VICE. From 2007-2016, he executed large-scale architectural glass commissions across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia as a Project Manager with Chihuly Studio. In 2018 he opened OMNIA, a career spanning survey at Bellevue Arts Museum, and was included in the book Lust For Light. He is currently the Creative Director at Western Neon, Executive Director at Western Neon School of Art, represented by SEASON, and lives in Seattle, Washington.

Folayemi (Fo) Wilson is an object and image maker whose work celebrates Black femme representation and the Black imagination as a technology of resistance and self-determination. Her work explores the Black Atlantic experience though sculptural and multimedia installations presenting speculative fictions that reference history integrating inspiration from American vernacular architecture, literature and science fiction, using original sculpture, found objects, archival media, sound and video.  Her process utilizes her training in art history and critical theory employing the archive and other research methods to mine history for use as material in her creative practice. Wilson earned a MFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design with a concentration in Art History, Theory & Criticism. She has been a grant recipient of the Graham Foundation for Advance Studies in the Fine Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Propeller Fund. Her writing and reviews have appeared in NKA, Journal of Contemporary African Art, the International Review of African American Art 

(IRAAA), among other publications. Wilson has been awarded residencies or fellowships at ACRE, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Djerassi, Kohler Arts/Industry program, Haystack, MacDowell Colony, and Purchase College/SUNY Purchase New York. Wilson is an Associate professor at Columbia College Chicago in the department of Art & Art History. Her design work is included in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt National Museum of Design. She is on the board of the American Craft Council and was honored as a 3Arts awardee in 2015. 

For more than two decades, Jan-Ru Wan has been re-using found objects, especially those discarded from industrial factories, in her sculpture and installation work, re-inventing and elevating their original purpose. Her unique way of incorporating wildly diverse materials with layers of repetition and creating a space of awe is the signature of her installation works.

Throughout Wan’s career, she has participated in 28 solo exhibitions and 44 group exhibitions including the 1st International Biennial of Casablanca at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art in Taiwan; the Yango-Biennial in Kinshasa, Congo and her upcoming solo exhibition at the Mint Museum in Charlotte NC, April 2019. Her work has been featured in Surface Design Magazine and Sculpture Magazine. The National Art Education Association Anthology: Globalization, Art, and Education devoted an entire chapter on her work. In 2006, The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee honored Wan with the GOLD award, recognizing her as the Graduate of the Last Decade. Wan is also the recipient of North Carolina’s 2008 Visual Art Fellowship for the amount of $10,000. Wan has also been awarded artist residencies in Taiwan, Thailand, Morocco, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States. Wan lives and works in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Jennifer Crescuillo is an internationally exhibited artist currently living and working in Silver Point, Tennessee with her family. She received her Master’s of Fine Art in glass at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She has taught and worked at various glass studios, such as The Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, Urban Glass, and Pilchuck Glass School. Her work has been included in New Glass Review 34, 36, and 38, and she has been a Wheaton Arts Fellow in 2014 and 2017 and an Emerging Artist in Residence at Pilchuck Glass School in 2016 Together with her partner, Andrew Najarian, Jennifer operates High Polish Studio specializing in custom glass fabrication and cold working services.

Jessica Green is a weaver who lives close to the land; seeking to integrate her life and work and unafraid of failure. Raising sheep and foraging for natural dyes, Jessica grows much of her cloth from the living world around her. She likes to get to the bottom of things, likes to know her materials, likes to know their root; she wants to be a beneficial member of a vibrant ecosystem.

While being deeply inspired and guided by those who have come before, Jessica is following the well-trod footpath of weavers and land-based women, relearning how to live a full life on this earth. 

With this in mind, she is the director of a rural, skills based fool school nestled deep in a mountain holler, the Cabbage School. Jessica’s work is quiet and asks for a quiet mind to fully appreciate the life and experience that has joyfully gone into its creation.

Jessica weaves to slow the world down.

Nicki Green is a transdisciplinary artist and educator whose work focuses on craft process and the production of material cultural and history. Her sculptures, drawings and paintings and ritual objects center questions of history preservation, conceptual ornamentation and the aesthetics of otherness. Originally from New England, she received a BFA in sculpture from San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley in 2018. She has exhibited her work internationally, notably at the New Museum in New York, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and Rockelmann & Partner Gallery in Berlin, Germany. Her writing and visual work has been included in and discussed in various publications, including a forthcoming piece in Transgender Studies Quarterly’s Trans*Religion issue, American Craft Magazine, and The MIT Press anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. She lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Santiago X, M.Arch, MFA is an Indigenous futurist and multidisciplinary artist specializing in land, architectural, and new media installation. He is an enrolled citizen of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana (Koasati) and Indigenous Chamoru from the Island of Guam U.S.A (Hacha'Maori). Santiago X has exhibited and designed Internationally, including The World Expo in Shanghai, China, Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Santiago X received a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Master of Architecture from the University of Southern California, and Bachelor's in Environmental Design from the University of Colorado.

Santiago X has reinvigorated the ancestral mound building practice of his Koasati people, via two large-scale augmented public earthwork installations constructed along the Chicago and Des Plaines River in Chicago, Illinois. This is notably the first time effigy earthworks have been constructed by Indigenous peoples in North America since the founding of the United States.

"The trajectory of my practice is an exploration of the human interface between our built environment, history, technology, our own self-relevance, and how we navigate this relationship to construct our notions of order in an infinite world of chaos. As an Indigenous futurist, I believe that art can transcend representation and become something sacred that embodies life itself, through a multiplicity of being. My work directly engages the notions of a post-human world, but actualizes to activate the possibility of our own prosperity, by painting our self-constructed limitations and deconstructing them."

Seth Gould is a metalsmith and tool maker who creates and ornaments utilitarian objects that range from simple tools to highly embellished locks. His work, which is strongly influenced by historic metalsmithing design and technique, typically begins in a coal forge and is finished at the bench with a file in hand. For the more elaborate pieces, ornamentation is added with hammer and chisel through the process of inlay and engraving.

In 2009 Seth graduated from Maine College of Art with a BFA in Metalsmithing and Jewelry Design. In the following years, his work and studio practice was shaped by his experiences working in the metalsmithing field, his time as a Core Fellow at the Penland School of Craft, and opportunities to view European and Japanese metalwork on multiple long-term trips abroad. Seth has exhibited work in Germany, Japan, and across the United States. He has taught, demonstrated, and lectured at institutions including Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, the Center for Metal Arts, Southern Illinois Metalsmithing Society, and the Society of North American Goldsmiths. His work can be seen in the collections of the Renwick Gallery, the National Ornamental Metal Museum, and the Arkansas Art Center. Seth recently completed the Penland School of Craft long-term residency and now lives with his wife and son in Bakersville, NC.

Thomas Schmidt is an American artist, designer and co-founder of Recycled China. In a time when experience is increasingly influenced by technology, Schmidt’s work attempts to both integrate and blur the boundaries between high tech and traditional craft methods as means for exploring the tactile world.  From digitally modeled building-blocks and crumpled porcelain tile, to panels of aluminum fused with porcelain shards, Schmidt draws upon installation art and architecture to orchestrate and capture a variety of material moments for the viewer to experience and unfold.

Thomas Schmidt received his BA at Loyola University Chicago in 2004, Post-Baccalaureate Certificate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006, and MFA at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2009.  Upon receiving his MFA, Schmidt moved to Beijing where he worked for four years as a Professor of ceramic design at the Alfred/CAFA Ceramic Design for Industry program at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. In 2012 he and partner Jeffrey Miller co-founded the design team Recycled China, whose work uses industrial waste within China to create architectural tile and sculptural objects.  Their work Recycled China Series #1 received the Bronze prize at The 2015 Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennale in South Korea and their work was recently acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 

Schmidt currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary 3D Studio at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.