The innovative team of Advisors includes:

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.

Phoebe Cummings / @phoebe_cummings

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.

Désirée Coral / @desireecoral

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 Georgia was the co-founder and lead contributor of UNPUBLISHED, an online publication featuring deep-dive texts into the work of unsung artists; she also directed the UNPUBLISHED Studio, a need-based studio residency and mentorship program in Los Angeles.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.

UNPUBLISHED / What About Clay? / @georgiasydney

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.

Cathy Lu / @_cathyclu_

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. 

Kristen Morgin / @kristenmorgin

Andres Payan Estrada

Andres Payan Estrada (b. in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. An artist and curator, his practice focuses on issues revolving around contemporary craft along with material and object practices with a focus on ceramics and queer theory. He is currently the curator of public engagement at Craft Contemporary and recently served as special visiting art faculty at the California Institute of the Arts and mentor at Warren Wilson College’s Master of Arts in Critical Craft Studies. Payan Estrada is also the co-curator and co-founder of Craft Contemporary’s National Clay Biennial, founded and leads the annual fundraiser and sale CLAY LA, and recently curated the exhibition Total Collapse, Clay in the Contemporary Past for the Arizona State University Museum, along with establishing POTLUCK, a large-scale biennial clay and ceramics fundraiser, auction, and free public program series that benefits Craft Contemporary.

Andres Paya Estrada / @andres_payan

Katherine (Kitty) Ross

As a ceramic sculptor, Katherine Ross is interested in the historical role of porcelain as a status symbol valued for purity and strength, elegance and propaganda.  Her work has always been concerned with the complex relationship we have to this material and the subtle, coded ways it operates within our culture.  Her expertise is in ceramic production for large installations addressing biological technology, disease and prophylaxis, notions of the obsolete and personal histories.  Currently, she is writing a book related to her family history.

Katherine has been a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago faculty since 1981, serving also as the decades-long Chair of the Ceramics Department and Interim Dean of Graduate Studies. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1976 from the State University of New York at Fredonia and her MFA in 1980 from Tulsa University. 

Katherine has exhibited across the world from the Jingdezhen National Ceramic Museum to The Centers For Disease Control Museum in Atlanta. She is the recipient of many awards at local, state, and national levels, including an Arts Midwest/NEA Grant and being recognized as a Walter Gropius Master Artist for 2012 by the Huntington Museum. Her work is published widely in periodicals and books on ceramic art in the U.S., Great Britain, China, Australia, and Switzerland. Katherine has also worked with several architects including Michael Graves to produce porcelain objects for the Taubman/Kalisman residence, and Ullman and Fil Architects to restore terra cotta facades, as well as numerous others on residential and restoration projects.

Katherine Ross / @katherineross819

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.

Stacy Jo Scott / @sdotjo

Nicole Seisler

Nicole Seisler is a Los Angeles-based ceramic artist who creates sculpture, installation, and public art that investigate time, materiality, process, and the overlapping roles of artist/viewer/participant/collaborator. Nicole has exhibited widely at museums ranging from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles. She has an 2021 solo exhibition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, CA and her book Recipes for Conceptual Clay (in the time of covid-19) was published in 2020.

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 taught ceramics at SAIC, the University of Washington, UCLA, and she was the Lincoln Visiting Professor of Ceramics at Scripps College. Nicole is also Director of A-B Projects, where she has curated over 30 exhibitions and is constantly innovating new formats for education in contemporary, conceptual ceramics.

Nicole Seisler / @nicole_seisler