Craft Advisory Council
The Craft Advisory Council is composed of distinguished members of the arts community with knowledge, experience, and insight into today’s arts and crafts arena, including educators, gallery owners, craft collectors, curators, and craft media artists. Council members serve as connectors, conveners, advisors, and review panelists and work alongside our Education staff to shape and grow the Center for Craft Studies.
The Center for Craft Studies offers a host of classes, workshops, and other opportunities for students to engage in craft media and creative industries. The council will meet quarterly to provide creative insights and guidance on the primary elements of our program, including the Certificate of Mastery of Craft and Creative Industries, Ceramic Artist-in-Residence, Contemporary Craft Lecture Series, Master Class Workshops, and Emerging Craft Teacher Mentorship Program.
2024 Craft Advisory Council
Nan Bevan
Nan Bevan creates luminous interior landscapes with glass.
Her larger pieces explore opalescent worlds with no boundaries and floating dreamscapes. Smaller vessels explore abstract forms and colorful patterns, inviting the viewer to bring beauty into everyday life. Her work is inspired by stories that seek to make sense out of an unknowable world, the endless color explorations of Paul Klee, and the beautiful, strange and often unpredictable changes heat will create in glass. When the kilns are full, she carries her love of color onto paper and canvas. In the past 20 years, her work has shown in exhibitions across the country. From the Lakes Region of New Hampshire, she now lives in Maryland and thinks often of snow.
Xiaosheng Bi
Xiaosheng Bi (he/him) was born in Xi’an China. After teaching ceramics at Qinghua University for eight years, Xiaosheng immigrated to USA in 1997. Now he lives in Maryland and teaches at Montgomery College and is a VisArts Studio Artist and ceramics instructor.
Xiaosheng’s work reflects his traditional Chinese influences, yet is infused with a contemporary aesthetic. Suffused with gentle colors, his delicate forms shine with the brilliant translucency of bone china porcelain. Traditional Chinese motifs such as bamboo leaves or lotus blossoms are painted and sculptural with dynamic, nearly abstract strokes.
Bi’s works have been exhibited in solo and group shows in Asia and the USA. His ceramic and sculpture works were collected by museums and private collectors.
Lorenzo Cardim
Lorenzo Cardim is a Brazilian-American visual artist, digital designer, and restorer. He holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art + Design and an MFA from the California College of the Arts. Cardim’s body of work has been showcased at various museums, galleries, universities, and film festivals nationally and internationally, including New York, Milan, Paris, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Oakland, Virginia, and Maryland. He was also honored with the 2019 Denis Diderot Scholarship Award in France.
Currently, Cardim is working on two significant reconstruction projects – a truss for the Notre Dame Cathedral in France and a full-scale Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome to be installed in July 2023 at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History.
Rebecca Cross
Owner and director of Cross MacKenzie Gallery since 2006, she has presented nearly 300 artists in over 150 art exhibitions, and art fairs in NYC, LA and Venice Italy. She was a guest curator for the American University Art Museum at the Katzen Center – “MORE CLAY- The Power of Repetition” and for the DC Art Center “Macho the Mask of Masculinity ”. Post college, while living in a coffee bean warehouse in Wapping, London, she assisted sculptor, Sir Anthony Caro and taught part-time at Southwark College. Her early studio practice featured solo painting shows at Addison Ripley Gallery, DC, group shows including “Hypercolorism” at Gallery D’este in NYC and commissioned work for hotels and restaurants. She designed colorful sets and costumes for Bresee Danskompani’s “Unstill Lives” performed in Oslo and the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theatre, and for City Ballet of Boston’s “Urban Nutcracker” by Tony Williams, now in its 20th year. A MacDowell Fellow, Cross’ public collections include the Washington Convention Center, Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery and the US State Department. Her ceramics were long sold through Barney’s New York, Costa Mesa and Japan. Cross has participated as a juror, lecturer or panelist for multiple arts organizations including The Smithsonian Craft Show, the Virginia AIA, Women’s Caucus for Art and the Washington Project for the Arts. She served on the board of the Renwick Alliance for Craft from 2007-2014.
Robert Devers
Robert Devers (he/him) is an artist with a multi-faceted practice that includes ceramics, sculpture, painting, and photography.
Ceramics remains his essential focus and provides the lens through which the other mediums are engaged and ultimately brought back into play in ceramic practice. He is the owner and founder of Blue Fire Studio in Mt. Rainier, Md.
Robert Devers received his MFA degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. He is currently Professor of Art at NOVA, in Annandale, VA.
Previous teaching experience includes; The George Washington University, The Corcoran College of Art + Design, American University, Montgomery College, and VisArts, among others.
Works in public collections include: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, American University Art Gallery; Katzen Art Center, Manuel Cargaliero Foundation, Ravello, Italy, Museo Manuel Cargaliero, Castelo Branco, Portugal, International Monetary Fund, and the Washington Brain and Spine Institute
Janet Greer
Janet Greer (she/her) has made nurturing creativity and curiosity part of her mantra for life.
She has taught children and adults art and ceramics for many years in a variety of settings. She has an MA from Hood College and is currently in their MFA program. Her art history studies have impacted her belief in the importance of Art as a unifier in today’s society. Janet is a lifelong lover of all things creative. From a young age, making art became her emotional voice and source of empowerment. This continues with her today as she interacts with children, youth, and adults alike. Her work is infused with reflections of family and the gift of nature we are blessed with as a human family. She hopes to inspire peace and celebrate unity amidst the chaos of today’s society.
Janet is an Adjunct Professor at Hood College, Frederick, Maryland where she teaches Ceramics. She loves teaching at VisArts where she is able to continue exploring the endless possibilities Ceramics offers. She is the Gallery coordinator for the Potter’s Guild of Frederick, where she displays and sells her work.
To view her work, please visit her website at janetgreerceramics.com
Wanjin Kim
Wanjin Kim grew up in Seoul, Korea and moved to the US in 1993 to pursue an art career. She began her studies English and Art in the US at Montgomery College, eventually completing a BFA degree at the Pratt Institute and an MFA degree at Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Her works examine the latent beauty of the natural world that surrounds daily life. Over the past two decades, Wanjin has exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions.
Currently, she has been teaching Jewelry Making, Mixed Media Crafts, Paper and Bookmaking, Drawing, Watercolor, Sewing and Sculpture at Montgomery College.
Armando Lopez-Bircann
Armando Lopez-Bircann (Arma Dura) is a Latinx artist that engineers wearable sculptures, digital media and performances. Their Extended Reality (XR) practice is framed by immigrant narratives, genderfluid expression, digital native sensibilities and a Queer Ecofeminist lens. They work as an independent artist and have also designed works in collaboration with dancers, circus performers, photographers, videographers, musicians and other artists. Notable accomplishments include an Artist Talk at the Hirshhorn Museum, being a DC Commission of Arts and Humanities fellow, and a Wherewithal Research Grant recipient. They graduated from Concordia University, the Corcoran College of Art + Design and are based in Washington DC.
Katie Macyshyn
Katie Macyshyn (they/she) is a performance artist and experiential art practitioner serving collaborative new media art. Their mixed media practice spans makeup art, wearables, installation, sound, video, and more. They are also an art instructor and songstress who specializes in the therapeutic benefits of creative play in early childhood and queering classrooms. Macyshyn holds a BFA from the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at George Washington University. She lives in Mount Rainier, MD and is from Toms River, NJ.
Rebecca Ravenal
Rebecca Ravenal is a studio artist and educator. Originally a ceramic artist, she has expanded into mosaic and mixed media work. Rebecca has taught children and adults at several local arts organizations, camps, and schools. She is an associate artist at the Torpedo Factory Arts Center and currently has her studio at Artists and Makers. In addition to making art, Rebecca is the Board President of the James Renwick Alliance for Craft and runs a family real estate business.
Vidya Vijayasekharan
Vidya Vijayasekharan is an artist, art historian, and educator, who has been teaching at Montgomery College since 1994, prior to which she worked at museums including the Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution. Originally from India, Vidya has been a resident of Montgomery County for over 30 years, and she is a spirited advocate for arts in education.