Class of 2023

Graduated June 1, 2023, on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh

This is the final cohort to graduate from the MA in Critical Craft Studies, Warren Wilson College

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Rena Tom

(she/her)Rena Tom (she/her) is an enthusiastic generalist who has a deep fascination with discomfort. Her research examines the role of tension as a positive creative force in craft, design, and culture. In the context of her studies, this currently manifests as investigations into absence, memory, immateriality, conceptual craft, and subversive exhibition practices. How do people and objects inhabit spaces where friction and uncertainty are present? She has been a maker, designer, writer, retailer, coworking space owner, consultant, instructor, and cultural producer for creative communities in San Francisco and Brooklyn for almost twenty years.

Rena has degrees in English and Mechanical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara, which doesn't explain anything except a relatively balanced left and right brain and a love for the beach. Her interests in handmade objects, thought experiments, pranks, and illusions come together in site-specific participatory art, artists books, and stickers. Crafts include sewing, cooking, knitting poorly, napping, reading comics, talking to plants, and eating ice cream with her son. She lives and works in Berkeley, CA.

 
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Miriam Devlin

Miriam (she/they) is a self-taught entrepreneur who works in the realm of carpentry and design/build, on old buildings, teaches wood, metal, and ecologically motivated physical design classes, and writes about her work. She is a volunteer naturalist, a student of materials, and enthusiastic about trees, stewardship, and cats. Undergraduate studies in history and philosophy of science, architecture, and chemistry as well as a youth spent teaching and working in museums, underpin her conceptual and practical framework. She also crochets, knits, sews, cooks, and throws clay vessels. She has only recently realized that "craft” could be a way to describe her way of work. She wishes for more space and collaboration for femme people in trade and handwork, and to share craft practice with the public.

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Jennifer Hand

Jennifer Hand (she/her) is a visual artist, writer, curator, mother and veteran Navy Diver who lives and creates in Norfolk, Virginia. Her work employs the captivating properties of molten glass to playfully probe our cultural notions of feminine strength. She pushes the limits of her medium through a practice of rigorous research and dedicated making. Committed to smashing silent taboos surrounding domestic violence and the gritty realities of motherhood, Jennifer champions a stance of Soft Resistance, which celebrates the myriad strengths of vulnerability. Her work has won numerous awards and has been on view in solo gallery shows, nationally juried exhibitions, and Burning Man 2019.

Jen is a 2022 Corning Museum of Glass Rakow Research Grant Recipient for her practicum work with Warren Wilson's MA in Critical Craft Studies, The Glow Up: Mapping Constellations of Care Among Women in American Studio Glass. Jen graduated from the Chrysler Museum of Art Glass Studio Assistantship in 2017, holds a BFA in Craft with a Minor in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University and received a 2018 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship. Jennifer serves on the boards of the 757 Creative Reuse Center and the Lil Truck of Tools Mobile Maker Initiative and is the co-founder with Poetry Jackson of the 757 Street Art Battle. Jen writes regularly for the Glass Art Society News and other publications, and in 2020 presented the panel "Nurturing Creativity: Balancing Practice and Parenthood" at the Glass Art Society Conference. Instagram @xojenniferalexis Website jenniferalexishand.com

 

Tina Wiltsie

Tina Wiltsie (she/her) is a Michigan-based metalsmith and jewelry artist. She attended Tyler School of Art, Temple University, where she earned her BFA in Metals/Jewelry/CAD-CAM and minors in Japanese, Spanish, and Art History. Her primary research focus is in the history and techniques of Japanese metalwork and she has traveled to Japan twice to pursue these studies. Her metalsmithing journey began at the age of twelve at Interlochen Arts Camp in northern Michigan and Tina has been proud to return to the camp as a staff member and instructor in the Visual Arts department for five summers. Tina views teaching as an integral part of her artistic practice and is interested in how we teach and learn craft skills. Tina currently lives in Ypsilanti, MI, where she is a member of Ypsi Alloy Studios.

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Jill DiMassimo

(she/her) I've had a career working on the intersection of art and ideas, in many different mediums.  I started my professional life working in advertising and marketing, in advertising agencies, a non-profit and later a big fashion brand where I balanced building brands and producing ad campaigns.  I had twins.  I moved to the suburbs.  I had another baby.  I took lots of classes in arts and photography. I took lots of photos and got paid for some of them. I partnered with small businesses -- an interior designer and a culinary school -- and worked on brand building and programming.  I became a docent at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC.  I embarked on a four-year project to send thousands of hand-drawn, collaged, painted, inked, hand-printed postcards to voters across America.  And I kept painting, collaging, printing and knitting.  

I'm married with three sons and a shaggy little dog.  I live in Westchester County, NY and I grew up in Philadelphia.  I earned a degree in English/Writing from Miami University of Ohio.  I play lots of tennis, though you would never mistake me for a natural athlete.  I love to garden, or really, follow instagram accounts of other people gardening.  In knitting they say there are process knitters and project knitters, and I am definitely all about process.  In this program, I'm looking forward to the rigorous study of objects and ideas especially around fiber arts, history, feminism, museum studies and American culture.

 
 
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Beryl Perron-Feller

Beryl Perron-Feller (they/she) is a New York based interdisciplinary crafts person. She is inspired by the intersections of art, culture, and science. Her work draws from personal exploration of gender roles and power through investigations of hard and soft mediums such as metal, textiles, and ceramics. In much of Beryl’s work, creating art is used as a mode of research; the process of making is just as important, if not more important than the final product. The connection she feels to materials and the tactile process of constructing become a way to find comfort. Crafting functional objects such as pottery and jewelry come most naturally to her. Wearable or usable pieces engage the viewer in a tactile way that reflects the comfort and closeness she feels in the process of making.

 
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Joanna Weiss

Joanna Weiss (she/her) has always described herself as a jack-of-all-trades, from following in the footsteps of her mother and grandmothers in knitting and crochet, mending and embroidery, jury-rigging and finagling, to researching and writing an undergrad thesis focusing on 19th-century Neoclassical sculpture and the intersections of identity, race, and gender in the work of sculptress Edmonia Lewis. Joanna holds a BA in Victorian Studies from Vassar, boasts a decade of teaching and promoting children's theater, and has more yarn and musical instruments than she can wrap her mind around. She can often be found with at least one black cat curled up beside her, surrounded by handmade blankets and quilts, while trying to read and knit at the same time.

 
 

Class of 2024

Julia Mandalakis

Julia is maker of all things and has a passion for exploring materials. Her academic research focuses on American history and art, and how it is remembered. She enjoys blacksmithing, particularly learning the history of the craft as well as crocheting, sewing, and drawing.

Warren Wilson College announced the closure of this program after the Class of 2024 had already been accepted. All other students elected to pursue their studies elsewhere, but we’re delighted to have Julia join us for MACR’s final class.

Update: Julia withdrew from the program at the end of Fall 2022