Welcome, new Core Fellows!
We’re excited to announce and welcome our three newest Penland Core Fellows— Erin Addie, Mia Donalson, and Jan Rybczynski. They will join returning fellows Kimberly Jo, Brandon Lopez, Nicholas McDonald, Grace Anne Odom, and Amal Tamari. For two years, they will live together, take classes, expand their practices, and help run Penland.
Learn more about the Penland Core Fellowship here.
Erin Addie is an artist currently living and working in Philadelphia, PA. Their work is primarily metal and wood, often exploring themes of home and identity. They look forward to expanding their understanding of craft and materials as a core fellow.
Clamp III (Bread), poplar, cast iron, bread, 11 x 6 x 16 inches
Check out Erin’s website and Instagram.
Mia Donalson‘s work references craft objects found in the home from the scale of furniture to jewelry. They utilize autoethnographic practices and subversion of expectation in form and materiality to investigate concepts of belonging.
Hold Your Tongue , sterling silver, human mouth, 4 x 2 x 3 inches
Check out Mia’s website and Instagram.
Jan Rybczynski loves experimenting with all kinds of materials and processes and is excited to be able to think creatively surrounded by such a wonderful community!
Torsion Chair, patinated steel and rope, 30 x 22 x 20 inches
Check out Jan’s website and Instagram.
Selection Panel
Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to apply. Penland received 200+ applications to the core fellowship this year. The selection process was thoughtfully undertaken by the following panel, in conjunction with Penland staff.
Tom Huang holds an MFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and is an Associate Professor of Design at The University of Kansas. He has exhibited nationally and is a Fellow of the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship. He has held exhibitions at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art and other nationally acclaimed art centers, has been published in American Craft Magazine, in E. Ashley Rooney’s Bespoke: Furniture from 101 International Artists, Eduard Broto’s Bamboo Design Guide & 59 Case Study, and Pablo van der Lugt’s Booming Bamboo. His love for paddling and his local waterways in Kansas inspires his most recent work.
Kento Saisho (he/him) is an artist and metalworker currently based in Los Angeles, CA. He makes vigorously textured and tactile sculptural objects, vessels, and contemporary artifacts. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2016, where he was a Windgate-Lamar Fellowship recipient from the Center for Craft. Following this, he completed the Core Fellowship at the Penland School of Craft from 2018-2020. He was also a recipient of the inaugural Emerging Artist Cohort from the American Craft Council (ACC) in 2021 and the 2022 Career Advancement Grant from the Center for Craft. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and currently shows at Citron Gallery in Asheville, NC and Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles, CA.
Originally from Yokohama, Japan, Sayaka Suzuki has been residing in the US for the past 35 years. She received her BFA from Tulane University in New Orleans and her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has been a workstudy student, scholarship recipient, teaching assistant and a teaching artist at Penland over the course of 20 years. Her work explores her deep roots in Japanese culture in conjunction with her new adopted identity as an American immigrant. She has had solo exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and Pensacola Museum of Art (FL) and been included in group shows at the Washington Project for the Arts-Corcoran (DC), New Mexico Museum of Art ,Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (Korea), and Museo Crocetti (Italy) among others. She is a recent recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and was a recent fellow at the Vermont Studio Center.
Christina Shmigel is a Ukrainian-American artist working in sculptural installation and drawing. Shmigel studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA 1980), sculpture at Brooklyn College (MFA 1987), metalsmithing at Southern Illinois University- Carbondale (MFA 1995) with additional training in blacksmithing at the Penland School of Craft. Since 1994, she has been active at Penland in various guises: student, studio assistant, resident artist, instructor, and board member. She is an educator and maker who has participated in numerous solo and invitational exhibitions both nationally and internationally.