CURRENT CORE FACULTY + TEACHING FELLOWS

Core Faculty and Teaching Fellows teach our four core curriculum courses — History & Theory, Materials Lab, Research Methods Lab, and Practicum Project — beginning with class sessions during residencies and continuing through the semester. Core Faculty and Teaching Fellows work both individually and collaboratively with the Director on curriculum. All Core Faculty and Teaching Fellows teach together during residencies, and individually during the remainder of the semester. Coursework is shared amongst cohorts and with the Director throughout the semester.

A select number of teaching spots are identified for early- to mid-career educators to build their teaching and course development experience. MACR Teaching Fellows develop and teach foundational (Core) courses in the MA in Critical Craft Studies in close collaboration with the Director of the program and other faculty. This opportunity provides team teaching experience in an interdisciplinary context to the Fellow, and broadens cross-disciplinary learning for our graduate students.

NAMITA GUPTA WIGGERS

Program Director, Core Faculty

History and Theory I and II
Research Methods Lab III and IV
Practicum I, II, III, and IV

Namita Gupta Wiggers (she/her) is a writer, curator, and educator based in Portland, OR. Wiggers is the Director and Co-Founder of Critical Craft Forum, an online and onsite platform for dialogue and exchange. She taught in the MFA Applied Craft + Design, co-administered by Oregon College of Art + Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art and at Portland State University. From 2004-2014, Wiggers served as Curator, and later as Director and Chief Curator (2012-14) at the Museum of Contemporary Craft (incorporated into the Center for Art & Culture, Pacific Northwest College of Art since 2016). She serves on the Board of Trustees of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and on the Editorial Boards of Garland magazine and Norwegian Crafts.  Wiggers served as the Exhibition Reviews Editor for The Journal of Modern Craft (2014-18), and now on the Advisory Board. She is the editor of the forthcoming  Companion on Contemporary Craft, Wiley Blackwell Publishers, and collaborates with co-author Benjamin Lignel on an ongoing research project on gender and jewelry. 

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SARA CLUGAGE - Core Faculty

Materials Lab III and IV

Sara Clugage’s (she/her) art and writing practices focus on political issues in textiles and food. She is the editor-in-chief of Dilettante Army (an online journal for visual culture and critical theory), an organizer for the Wikipedia campaign Art+Feminism, and core faculty for the Critical Craft Studies MA program at Warren Wilson College. Since 2015, her art practice has centered on a series of salon dinners themed on the economic models and culinary styles of diverse periods in art history. Her work has been shown at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR, and in residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; she has written for The Journal of Modern Craft, Surface Design Journal, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, and Pelican Bomb. She serves as a trustee for the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.

ANNA HELGESON - Core Faculty

Practicum Project I / Faculty Liaison for Cohort 2024

Anna Helgeson (she/her) is an artist, educator, writer, and curator interested in histories of othering, gravitating specifically towards topics of race, gender, and queerness. She has exhibited, performed, and lectured at venues throughout the United States including Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center (Asheville, NC),The Asheville Art Museum (Asheville, NC), The University of North Carolina (Asheville, NC), Work Gallery (Detroit, MI), The Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and has contributed to publications including The Journal of Modern Craft, Holler, and is featured on the website “Reframing Photography; Theory and Practice”. Anna is currently enjoying teaching with the MA in Critical Craft Studies program and at Western Carolina University as well as managing the website Craft Conscious.

BENJAMIN LIGNEL - Core Faculty

Materials Lab II, III, and IV

Benjamin Lignel (he/him) is an educator, writer, curator and artist. He is a founding member of la garantie, association pour le bijou, an organisation dedicated to producing discourse on contemporary jewelry through exhibitions, symposia, and publications. Lignel co-curated also known as jewellery (2008), MirrorMirror (2011), Difference and Repetition (2013), Exposé (2017), Medusa, Jewellery and Taboos (2017) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Tableau Vivant (2018) at the Pinakothek der Moderne / the Design Museum, Munich. Alongside his curatorial practices, he started contributing essays and op-eds to magazines and publications in 2006, and became a member of Think Tank. A European Initiative for the Applied Arts, in 2009. He was the editor of Art Jewelry Forum between January 2013 and December 2016. During his tenure, Benjamin oversaw the publication of more than 350 essays, reviews and interviews, and edited three books, including the first book-length study of jewelry exhibition-making. He is guest teacher at Alchimia (Florence), the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Nürnberg), HDK-Valland (Gothenborg), and core faculty at the M.A. in Critical Craft Studies (Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa). He is on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Jewellery Research (Loughborough), and on the board of the Knowledge House for Craft. After a twenty-year career in jewelry, Ben has steered his creative interest towards making ceramic cookware, which he is still learning to do. He lives in Montreuil (France).

TOM MARTIN, PhD - Core Faculty

Research Methods III and IV
History and Theory III and IV

Tom Martin (he/him) holds a doctorate from Oxford University, where he researched perception and understanding among wooden boat builders on the American East Coast. Tom is interested in sensory ethnography, studies in perception, and other anthropological theories and methods that connect mind, body, and socio-material world; he currently teaches courses on these subjects at the City University of New York (CUNY), and began as a Core Lecturer on the Warren Wilson MA in Critical Craft Studies in 2020. His book is titled 'Craft Learning as Perceptual Transformation' (Palgrave Macmillan 2021).

Core Faculty & Teaching Fellows

2021-2022 Academic Year

photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe

MICHELLE MILLAR FISHER - Core Faculty

History & Theory IV

Michelle Millar Fisher is currently the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work focuses on the intersections of people, power, and the material world. At the MFA, she is working on her next book, tentatively titled Craft Schools: Where We Make What We Inherit, and, as part of an independent team of collaborators, on a book (MIT Press 2021), exhibition, curriculum, and program series called Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births. Find it on Instagram at @designingmotherhood. The recipient of an MA and an M.Phil in Art History from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, she received an M.Phil from and is currently completing her doctorate in art history at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY).

She has long been interested in the confluence of gender and design, the subject of an independent co-organized exhibition and co-published book, I Will What I Want: Women, Design, and Empowerment (spring 2018), in conjunction with muca-Roma, Mexico City. 

Previously, she was the The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where she co-organized Designs for Different Futures (book and exhibition, 2019), helped rethink the display of nineteenth century European decorative arts, and engaged in research for the PMA’s new Gehry galleries which center contemporary art and design production at local and global levels. From 2014-2018 she was a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she co-organized, amongst others, the exhibitions Design and Violence, This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good, From the Collection, 1960-1969 and Items: Is Fashion Modern? as well as accompanying catalogues.

Before that, she worked at the Solomon. R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She frequently lectures at conferences and symposia, and has been an instructor at Parsons The New School for Design, CUNY’s Baruch College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. 

She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Graham Foundation Award, a Pew Center for Arts & Heritage project award, a full CUNY Graduate Center Enhanced Chancellor’s Dissertation Fellowship, several Kress Foundation Institutional Grants for Digital Resources, a DAAD Summer Language Fellowship, and an Arts & Humanities Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship.

Fisher likes working collaboratively. In 2011, she co-founded ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org, a Kress Foundation-funded project now used in over 185 countries. In 2019, she co-founded Art + Museum Transparency, dedicated to supporting critical conversations on the Intersections of art and labor, and home to the Salary Transparency Spreadsheet. .

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ALEJANDRO T. ACIERTO - Teaching Fellow

History and Theory III

alejandro t. acierto (he/him) is an artist, musician, and curator whose work is largely informed by legacies of colonialism found within human relationships to technology and material cultures. He has presented projects and screenings for the 2019 Havana Biennial in Matanzas, Cuba, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Issue Project Room (NYC), MCA Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Echo Park Film Center (LA), Stove Works (Chattanooga) and Eastside Projects (Birmingham, UK), among others. He is also co-director of CQDELAB, an ongoing collaborative project with KT Duffy invested in developing and sustaining queer-feminist digital spaces, systems, and toolsets. Together, they authored the artist book CQDE: A Feminist Manifestx of Code-ing published by Sybil Press. Additionally, his curatorial projects have been mounted at Vanderbilt University’s Space 204 Gallery, Coop (Nashville), and online for the Wrong Biennial and his writing has appeared in the Journal for Asian Diasporic Visual Culture and the Americas, in the edited volume Imperial Islands: Art, Architecture, and Visual Experience in the US Insular Empire after 1898, edited by Joseph R. Hartman for UHawaii Press. acierto has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff Centre, High Concept Laboratories, LATITUDE, Chicago Artists' Coalition, and Digital Artist Residency. A 3Arts Awardee, he holds degrees from DePaul University (BM), Manhattan School of Music (MM), University Illinois at Chicago (MFA), and was inaugural Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University. He is currently Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance at Arizona State University, New College.

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JEFFREY A. KEITH, PhD - Core Faculty

Research Methods I and II

Jeffrey A. Keith (he/him) was in line to become a sixth-generation Kentucky tombstone salesman, but he ended up discovering his own way to engage with the past. He earned a doctorate in history from the University of Kentucky, and now he teaches courses on U.S. foreign relations, Appalachian studies, environmental history, and globalization as a professor of global studies at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. He also serves on the graduate faculty for Warren Wilson College’s MA program in critical craft studies. Keith writes essays about rural life, cultural history, and diplomacy, and he has toured throughout the U.S. and abroad playing old-time and bluegrass music.

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TIFFANY N. MOMON - Teaching Fellow

History and Theory I

Tiffany Momon (she/her) received her B.S., in Political Science from Tennessee State University, a B.A. in African and African American Studies from The University of Memphis, and M.A. and Ph.D. in Public History from Middle Tennessee State University. Her dissertation explored material culture objects at historically black colleges and universities and methods of using those objects to document student histories and experiences fully. Her graduate training focused on exploring African American placemaking throughout the southeast documenting cemeteries, churches, schools, and lodges. In 2017, Momon was awarded a National Park Service grant to architecturally survey and document eight of Alabama’s nine historically black colleges and universities. As a Visiting Research Professor with the MTSU Center for Historic Preservation, Momon trained students on the techniques of writing historic structures reports, heritage development plans, and submitting National Register of Historic Places nominations. Her most recent National Register of Historic Places nominations include Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Talladega College (Boundary Increase) in Talladega, Alabama.

As a public historian, Momon’s work includes advocating to city and state governments in support of local history projects and archaeology ordinances and partnering with local communities to document and preserve their history. Additionally, Momon works closely with several historically black colleges and universities to raise funding for historic preservation projects and public archaeology on those campuses. 

Momon has provided consulting to several museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville, TN, the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN, and the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, TN among others. Momon has also been featured on Voice of America and other media outlets. 

Momon’s current research focuses on the lives, artistry, and labor of enslaved and free craftsmen in Charleston, South Carolina. Momon was invited to present this research at Colonial Williamsburg’s Antiques Forum, Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts and the Historic Charleston Foundation.

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MARA HOLT SKOV - Core Faculty

Materials Lab I and II

Mara Holt Skov (she/her) is an art, craft and design historian, curator, author and educator teaching design history, culture and context courses to graduates and undergraduates. She tracks rising macrotrends across all creative disciplines and champions design for overlooked human needs, especially aging and death. She most enjoys helping students to find their own paths toward meaningful creative lives so that they can work to make positive change in the world. 

She has authored The Impermanence of Things (2019), co-authored Manufractured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects (2008) and Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design (2005), contributed essays to Edith Heath: Philosophies (2021) Object Focus: The Bowl at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland (2013), Heath Ceramics: The Complexity of Simplicity (2006), Selections: The Permanent Collection of the San Jose Museum of Art (2004) and has written articles for ARTNews, I.D. Magazine and Art & Antiques.

PAST CORE FACULTY

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Yasmeen Siddiqui

Materials Lab II, Spring 2020

Yasmeen Siddiqui is the founding director of Minerva Projects (www.minervaprojects.org). Guiding her practice is a commitment to testing perceptions of artists and existing art movements through a synchronized interplay of exhibition making and writing. Collaborating on multiple fronts with art historian, Alpesh Kantilal Patel, they are co-editing the anthology, "The Storytellers of Art Histories" (under contract with Intellect Books). Past subjects in writing and curating include Do Ho Suh, Consuelo Castañeda, Hassan Khan, Linda Ganjian, Pia Lindman, Lara Baladi, Mary Carothers, Matt Lynch and Chris Vorhees, and Mel Charney.

2018 Ucross Foundation Residency Fellow

2018 ICI Independent Vision Curatorial Award Nominee

2008 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship

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Linda Sandino

Research Methods I and II, Fall 2018 - Spring 2020

Linda Sandino has tried to escape disciplinary boundaries for most of her academic and thinking life.  A BA in History and English Literature, an MA in Design History (on the UK magazine Crafts), and a PhD on oral history and narrative research in the visual arts have all arisen out of a desire to find out about more than just one thing! However, in retrospect, there is a general focus on the problem of representation and the means and forms of transmission: magazines, portraits, and voice. The main question in my research is about how and why identity is constructed, sustained and reconfigured over time.  Life history work with artists, designers and curators has been the method I have used to explore these issues, drawing on the work of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur:  narrative, remembering, identity, ethics, and interpretation.  How the mythologies of ‘craft’ have been created and mobilized in the production of its objects and personalities is a question that parallels the research I conduct at the V&A where curatorship is articulated through a reflective, dialogical, narrative process.   I have written on UK jewellery, ceramics, and textiles, but over the last ten years, I have moved from objects to ‘subjects’ by undertaking life history research on curators at the V&A.  Alongside this, I have been teaching art and design history on graduate and post-graduate programmes (Chelsea College of Art, Central St Martin’s, Royal College of Art, Sussex University) as well supervising doctoral students with whom interaction and exchange has continued to enforce my belief in the intellectual power of dialogue.

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Leslie Carol Roberts

Materials Lab I, Fall 2020

Leslie Carol Roberts’ is an author, journalist, professor, and photographer who explores the eco-memoir, layered stories reflecting on climate, ecologies, art, histories, and the narrative of place, through the lens of the personal essay. Her books include Here Is Where I Walk: Episodes from a Life in the Forest (Nevada, 2019) and The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctic (Nebraska, 2008, 2011).  She has a chapter in the forthcoming Performing Ice  (Palgrave Macmillan). Leslie frequently collaborates with artists, architects and designers, and founded the Ecopoesis Project in 2018 and is working several textiles-based projects, including the Ecological Tea Towel. 

She has lived and worked as a journalist in Australia, Antarctica, New Zealand, and Thailand, and her writing has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Fast Company, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Bellevue Literary Review, the Iowa Review, and Fourth Genre, among others. She has received an NEA, a Fulbright, and a Fulbright Travel Grant, and is a research scholar in the field of Antarctic humanities, speaking at conferences in the US and abroad, researching eco-activism and the materiality of ecologies. She teaches creative writing and storytelling for designers and artists at California College of the Arts, where she chairs the MFA Writing Program. She writes a monthly column for The Believer, Eco-Thoughts. 

  • www.lesliecarolroberts.org

  • https://scratchingthesurface.fm/147-leslie-roberts

  • https://www.architecturalecologies.cca.edu/research/antarctica-poetica

  • https://believermag.com/logger/eco-thoughts-an-interview-with-hugh-broughton/

  • https://believermag.com/logger/an-interview-with-timothy-morton/

  • https://believermag.com/logger/eco-thoughts-an-interview-with-jedediah-purdy/

  • https://believermag.com/logger/eco-thoughts-an-interview-with-joanna-zylinska/

  • https://readthebestwriting.com/it-is-the-year-1985-leslie-carol-roberts/

  • https://bombmagazine.org/articles/leslie-carol-roberts-interviewed/

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Shannon Rae Stratton

Materials Lab I, Fall 2019

With a background in studio craft, Shannon Stratton’s multi-disciplinary practice approaches organizing cultural platforms and events as collaborative, context-responsive acts of care. Based between Montreal, QC and Queens, NY, Stratton was trained in fiber and painting, with an MFA in studio art. In 2003 she co-founded the artist-run organization, Threewalls (Chicago), where she was artistic and then executive director for 12 years. At Threewalls, she organized exhibitions with over 100 artists, including Cauleen Smith, William Cordova, Claire Pentecost, Dani Leventhal, Betsy Odom, Edie Fake, Zach Cahill and Daniel Barrow. With Threewalls she co-created The Propeller Fund award in collaboration with Gallery 400 for artist’s self-organizing; conceived and published 4 volumes of PHONEBOOK, a national guide to grass-roots and artist-run organizations across the US; and co-organized the first Hand-in-Glove conference which would lead to the founding of Common Field, a national organization in support of artist-focused organizations.

From 2015-2019 she was Chief Curator at The Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Over her tenure at MAD, she launched the Burke Prize, 1st Site and programmed 35 exhibitions at MAD, including curating: Tanya Aguiñiga: Craft & Care; Atmosphere for Enjoyment: Harry Bertoia’s Environment for Sound; Coille Hooven: Tell it By Heart; Roger Brown: Virtual Still Lifes; Ebony G. Patterson: …buried again to carry on growing; In Time: The Rhythm of the Workshop; Anne Lindberg: the eye’s level and Sonic Arcade: Shaping Space with Sound.

As an independent curator she co-curated the exhibition Gestures of Resistance with artist Judith Leemann at the former Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR. The exhibition examined craft as a verb, whose political power lies in its process, by presenting a group of artists who used craft as action in making performance, social practice and pedagogical work. In 2014 she organized the touring exhibition, Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries. She recently edited the monograph, Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries which is published by Intellect Books. 

Stratton is currently working with The John Michael Kohler Arts Center, developing the exhibition Even thread has a speech as part of Leonore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe (fall 2019); has assumed the role of Artistic Director at The Poor Farm; and is developing the biannual, networked exhibition Slow Frequency, which takes the climate crisis as the imminent limit to the production of cultural events, and asks: how do you maintain a global art-world engagement, with the smallest carbon footprint?   

She was an Adjunct Professor in the Fiber and Material Studies/Art History, Theory & Criticism at The School of the Art Institute from 2005-2015, the Critical Studies Fellow at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2012 and has been a returning member of faculty at Ox-bow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan where she teaches the class Party As Form.

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Alicia Ory DeNicola

History and Theory III and IV, Fall 2019 - Spring 2020

Alicia Ory DeNicola is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Oxford College of Emory University. Her research explores the ways that craft, as a discourse, is marshaled by those who create it, claim it, market it, and procure it. She is interested in how both individual and cultural identity is influenced by ideas of art and craft, and she currently does ethnographic research in both India and Costa Rica. She is co-author of Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization, and Capitalism as well as a number of journal publications that focus on craft. Her M.A. is in Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies from Brandeis University and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Syracuse University. DeNicola is interested in the c`onnections between the work people do, their status within their communities, and the ways in which they utilize, inhabit and understand the environment around them. Whether she is working with traditional textile printers in North India or logging and fishing families in the US pacific northwest, these three issues have provided recurring themes in her efforts to understand some of the connections people see between themselves, their work, and their environment.

She conducts research in Bagru, India (Rajasthan) where she work with hand-block textile printers and study the local practices and global politics surrounding this traditional craft. She also works in logging communities in the US Pacific Northwest where she has done life history interviews with some of her students and their families. While the landscapes of the pacific rainforest and the Indian desert are as visibly and culturally different as they can be, there are also many similarities in the way that people work in and relate to the environment around them. In India the availability of water and open land might distinguish between a well-to-do printing family and a family with less security. Currently the availability of Geographic Indication Status for printers may help them to retain the creative aspects of their labor. In the US stories of masculinity and heroism--often told by women--are important ways that people distinguish themselves and understand their connection to nature and the environment. All of these issues are also intimately related to power, whether through access to the places people inhabit or individual claims of identity and value. More recently, she has begun a research program in Costa Rica looking at small independent businesses and immigration.