Program Advisors
Participants receive critical feedback from ABCC Advisors in one-on-one meetings throughout the program.
ABCC Advisors are artists, writers, curators, and mentors who are shaping the trajectory of contemporary ceramics.
Participants work with two Advisors during the Foundation hours of the program and may add on additional meetings with out Advisors during the Electives portion of the program.
Our innovative team includes:
Désirée Coral
Désirée Coral (b. 1981 in Quito, Ecuador) earned her MFA in Ceramics from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was a student at the Moncloa School of Ceramics in Madrid (where she learned “the craft”), and completed her undergraduate studies in Visual Arts at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Quito. Coral is currently completing her PhD at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee in Scotland UK, where she investigates the material relationship between human and non-human beings through color and its materiality. She has exhibited and published internationally.
Phoebe Cummings
Phoebe Cummings studied Three-Dimensional Crafts at the University of Brighton, before completing an MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2005. She has undertaken artist-residencies, in the UK, USA and Greenland, including six months at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2010 and a Ceramics Fellowship at Camden Art Centre 2012/13. Exhibitions and commissions have included the Museum of Arts & Design, New York; University of Hawai’i Art Gallery, Honolulu; Jerwood Space, London and Mesher, Istanbul. She was the winner of the British Ceramics Biennial Award 2011 and the inaugural BBC Woman’s Hour Craft Prize 2017. Cummings is a Research Associate at the University of Westminster, Ceramics Research Centre - UK and is currently undertaking an Artist Research Fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Berenice Hernández
Berenice Hernández works with sculpture, video, photography, and performance. Her practice explores the significance of spaces—their foundations and the power they hold over both society and the individual. She holds a BFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) and an MFA from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Her work has been exhibited in Mexico, Sweden, Norway, the UK, the USA, and Belgium. Recent exhibitions include Yrke: Fragmentarie at Galleri Svarta Gran, Borlänge; Memento Mole at Etnografiska Museet, Stockholm; Assembled Absence at Berg Gallery, Stockholm; and Measures of the Void at Norsk Billedhoggerforening, Oslo. Her work is part of the collections of KODE Art Museum of Bergen, Norway; Handelsbankens Konstförening; Statens Konstråd; Region Dalarna; and Region Stockholm, Sweden. She is currently working on a public commission for Park Central, Gothenburg.
Georgia Lassner
Georgia Lassner is a writer, critic, and educator based in Los Angeles. She is currently a visiting lecturer at the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University in Orange, CA; the executive editor of What About Clay; and an advisor for the ABCC ceramics certificate program in Los Angeles. Georgia’s recent publications include “Invisible Instruments: On Sigrid Burton’s Making Light Visible,” Tufenkian Fine Arts, and “Dale Brockman Davis at Matter Studio Gallery,” Carla issue 28; she has been a contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal since 2018. Georgia was the co-founder and lead contributor of UNPUBLISHED, an online publication featuring deep-dive texts into the work of unsung artists; she also directed the UNPUBLISHED Studio, a need-based studio residency and mentorship program in Los Angeles. In addition to her writing and editorial work, Georgia held the position of Review Coordinator and Writer for the School of Art at CalArts from 2018-2021. In 2019, Georgia was a finalist for the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She holds an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, and a BA from Bennington College in Bennington, VT.
Cathy Lu
Cathy Lu (b. Miami, FL) is a ceramics based artist that manipulates traditional Chinese art imagery and presentation as a way to deconstruct the assumptions we have about Chinese identity and cultural authenticity. By creating ceramic based sculptures and installations, she explores what it means to be both Asian and American, while not being entirely accepted as either. Unpacking how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of American identity is central to her work.
She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and her BA & BFA from Tufts University. She has participated in artist in residence programs at Root Division, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Recology SF, and the Archie Bray Foundation. Her work has been exhibited at Johansson Projects, Somarts, Aggregate Space, A-B Projects, and Chinese Culture Center. She was a 2019 Asian Cultural Council/ Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation Fellow. She currently teaches at California College of the Arts and Mills College.
Kristen Morgin
Kristen L. Morgin (b. 1968, Brunswick, GA) is the eldest daughter of Lowell and Lucille Morgin. Kristen earned a BA degree from California State University, Hayward. She earned a MFA degree with an emphasis in ceramics from Alfred University in 1997. Kristen has held job positions as an artist, a gallery docent, a children’s playhouse set painter, a secretary in an auto glass shop, and as a professor of art. She has taught at California State University Long Beach, University of Georgia, UCLA, and California State University Northridge. She is known for her unfired clay sculptures. Her artistic practice has included aspects of sculpture, painting, illustration and drawing. Her artwork has been widely exhibited, is in many private collections, and the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Hammer Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She currently resides in Gardena, California.
Katherine (Kitty) Ross
Katherine is Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, having taught ceramics for 40 years. She served for decades as the Chair of the Ceramics Department and from 2008 to 2010 she served as the Interim Dean of Graduate Studies. She continues her studio practice in a material, conceptual, experimental and historical approach to ceramics.
Katherine is the recipient of many awards and grants including the Chicago Artists International Program Travel Grant, Arts Midwest/NEA Grant, Indiana State Arts Commission Master Fellowship, Banff Center for the Arts Residency, and the Williamson Memorial Artist In Residence at Indiana State University. She has been named a Walter Gropius Master Artist for 2012 by the Huntington Museum. She is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, Geneva, Switzerland.
Katherine’s work is published widely in periodicals and books on ceramic art in the U.S., Great Britain, China, Australia, and Switzerland. Her book, The Erasure of Mikhail Yeyegov was published in 2024 by NFB Publishing.
Stacy Jo Scott
Stacy Jo Scott works to disrupt the presumed binary of the tangible materiality of clay and the intangible machinic code of emergent technologies. Her research explores the possibilities of using digital processes of material fabrication—such as custom generative software tools and unorthodox 3D printing techniques—to convey an unsettled history, eliciting a sense of poetic speculation and queer futurity. By embracing glitches and digital idiosyncrasies that interrupt the numeric logic of the machine, she aims to expand our collective understanding of what it means to be materially embodied in a world that is increasingly intertwined with technology.
Stacy Jo’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at Galleri ROM, Oslo, Norway; Holding Contemporary, Portland, OR; Design Fest, Gent, Belgium; Rockelman & Partner, Berlin, Germany; Thomas Hunter Projects in New York, NY; and upcoming at AB Projects, Los Angeles, CA. Her writing has been published in numerous publications online and in books and periodicals, and she has participated in various residencies including the Visiting Artists and Scholars Program at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and was previously a Franzen Fellow for Digital Craft at Colorado State University, a Lecturer at University of California, Berkeley, and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Ceramics at the University of Oregon.
Nicole Seisler
Nicole Seisler creates dialogue and perspectives around ceramics that exist in the same conditions as the material: malleable, shifting, adaptable, and enduring; existing within, between, and beyond conventional definitions.
Three interdependent, mutually-reinforcing areas comprise Nicole’s practice: making, educating, and curating. This tripod enables each aspect to support the others, thereby creating a platform for her broader, pluralistic vision for ceramics as a conceptual field.
Nicole received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has exhibited her work at museums ranging from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts Tallahassee to the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles. Her work was recently featured in a solo exhibition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, CA, and the two-person exhibition In Hand: Contemporary Material Engagements with the Built World at the Kennedy Museum at Ohio University.
Nicole has taught ceramics for almost fifteen years at as many universities — from SAIC and the University of Washington, to Scripps College and UCLA — and she is currently Assistant Professor and Head of Ceramics at Lewis & Clark College.
As Founder and Director of A-B Projects, Nicole has curated forty exhibitions and offers alternative educational programming that reevaluates and redefines the trajectory of contemporary ceramics.