Claire Passmore is a British born artist working in stitched textiles. Her first career was as a teacher, working with young children, adults, and refugees in the UK, Poland, South Africa, and France. Upon retiring she discovered another passion, working with fabrics and thread to create textile sculptures and wall hangings. She is presently very happily settled on the beautiful and peaceful island of Mauritius.  

Claire's award-winning art is exhibited in galleries, museums, and public venues in Mauritius, Europe, the United States, Australia, China, and Korea. It is also included in several private, corporate, and museum collections. Her work is published in numerous books, journals, and magazines, and she is also the author of Quilting Originals: Design your own art quilts.  

Claire is a Juried Artist member of Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA).  

Diane Melms works in her home studio in Anchorage, Alaska. Inspired by a love for fabric, color, and pattern, her artwork embodies a passion for manipulating formal design elements to create engaging abstract compositions. Working from a palette of her own hand-dyed and printed fabrics, she uses an improvisational method of cutting, arranging, and sewing fabric pieces together as she builds her compositions organically on the design wall. She finishes each piece by adding layers of batting and backing and dense patterns of topstitching. The work is labor intensive and time consuming.   

Diane grew up in Michigan and graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a Master of Arts in Education. After a long and rewarding career teaching art in public schools, she transitioned to working in her studio as a full-time artist 15 years ago. Throughout her career, she enjoyed exploring and teaching all forms of art, but she was always especially interested in fiber arts. She now focuses on working with textiles as her primary medium. She says, "I am inspired by the women who came before me who used fabric as a creative medium. In my work, I strive to honor these aesthetic roots and push cloth-work into new territory." 

Her work has been selected for prestigious national and international exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Diane has work in the Anchorage Museum's permanent collection and in several private collections and has garnered many awards including Juror's Awards in Anchorage Museum Exhibits and a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, and she was a featured artist in QUILTED, in Uppercase Publishing's book series Encyclopedia of Inspiration.  

Living in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, I’m a juried SAQA artist (Studio Art Quilts Associates), and I sit on the board of the Virginia Quilt Museum in Dayton, Virginia.

Once a traditional flat quilter, my work has left the surface to become sculptures that taunt the viewer to reach out and touch. My garden as it changes from season to season is the inspiration for my work. I start with botanical forms of leaves, flowers, or weeds, reducing the designs to more abstract forms, and finding the essence of the structure. I create art to show aspects of the natural world that few stop to observe and serve as a start for conversations about saving our flora and fauna. I use all textiles, new and vintage conventional quilting fabrics, repurposed quilts I made or collected, reclaimed tablecloths, curtains, clothing from family and friends, salvaged upholstery textiles, and decorator samples diverted from landfills. Viewing my wall of collected fabric, fabrics will catch my eye, bringing color, texture, or pattern to my art. I am creating a whimsical garden of flowers and vessels with ties to my family and community.

Michele holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University and spent a decade doing research at 3M. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University. As a visual artist, she was trained at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and relies on many traditional techniques from quilting and bookbinding, but she is self-taught in sewing, constantly inventing new ways of combining paper, fabric, and stitching in her studio. Michele’s poetry and woods journaling are the inspiration for, or find their way into, her visual artwork.

Redmond's work has been exhibited in major internationally recognized exhibitions, including Quilt National, Visions Museum of Textile Art, SAQA's International Exhibits, Fiberart International, Fantastic Fibers, Quilts=Art=Quilts, Intersect Chicago, Excellence In Fibers, San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, Art Quilt Elements, New Legacies, World of Threads California, among other juried invitational and solo exhibitions. Her work has won awards at New Legacies Colorado; Fiber Arts IX, Sebastopol, CA; Maryland Federation of Art; Maria V. Howard Arts Center, Rocky Mount, NC; Fantastic Fibers; and Visions Museum of Textile Art's Quilt Japan Award; among others. She has appeared on Quilting Arts TV, produced Interweave DVD Workshops and made an appearance on The Quilt Show with Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims in 2025. Her work has traveled the US, UK, Europe, Japan, and Australia, and is part of the permanent collections of Marbaum at San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, CA; Maria V. Howard Arts Center, Rocky Mount, NC; New England Quilt Museum; and private collections. She has been featured in numerous magazines and books including her own published books, Digital Fiber Art and Mixed Media Masterpiece and Explorations with Collage-–Merging Photographs, Paper, and Fiber with Schiffer Publishing. She currently splits her time between North Carolina and New Hampshire.  

Leesa Zarinelli Gawlik hails from a French Colonial town in the Midwest, where she was mentored at a young age by local artists. Her post-university career as a graphic designer / art director of corporate identity and print communications was intentionally disrupted by a seventeen-year period of living overseas. Exploring the realm of diverse cultures contributed to a self-guided education in the field of textiles. She now resides in southwest Colorado.   

Her work has been exhibited over the course of three decades in museums and other venues including: The Center for Contemporary Arts, Craft Alliance, Fontbonne University, Lincoln Center, New England Quilt Museum, Oceanside Museum of Art, Philadelphia Art Alliance, San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, Schweinforth Cultural Center, Sedgwick Cultural Center, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, Virginia Quilt Museum, Visions Museum of Textile Art, Wayne Art Center, Whistler House Museum of Art, Yeiser Art Center. Publications and media include: Art Quilts International – Abstract & Geometric, Fiber Art Now, Fiber Arts Design Book 7, Fiberarts Magazine, PBS – The Art of Quilting, Quilt Arts International, Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA), Surface Design Journal, The Encyclopedia of Quilting and Patchwork Techniques, The Japan Times, Tokyo Broadcasting Company. 

Dianne Firth is an Australian textile artist and landscape architect based in Canberra. Her ideas are primarily informed by the natural environment and its processes. Using principles of abstraction, she likes to manipulate line, shape, color, and texture to capture the essence of an idea and its mood. Dianne exhibits regularly in Australia and overseas in solo, invitational, and juried exhibitions. Her works are held in major public collections in Australia and USA. 

Helen Geglio is an artist and art educator living in South Bend, Indiana. Originally from Michigan, she received her BFA in studio art from the University of Michigan and also holds an MS in education from Indiana University. In her work as an artist, she creates hand stitched fiber artworks and has been represented in local, regional, and national exhibits. Her work has been selected for Quilt National, Art Quilt Elements, Fantastic Fibers, Quilts=Art=Quilts, Artist as Quiltmaker, and Visions: Interpretations. Helen regularly exhibits with SAQA Global Exhibitions and the Surface Design Association, and she is a long-time member of Woman Made Gallery and the Women's Caucus for Art.  

For over three decades I worked as a design director for major U.S. textile manufacturers, and in 1997 I formed my own independent textile design firm in NYC. My designs have been included in the collections of Knoll and Design Tex and featured in publications such as Interior Design and Elle Décor.  

My handwoven fiber artworks have been presented in numerous exhibitions including Handweavers Guild of Boulder, Colorado (Juror's Choice Award 2019); the Rocky Mountain Biennial (Honorable Mention 2020); Colorado's Art of the State Triennial 2022 and Complexity 2022: Innovations in Weaving" in 2023 Fantastic Fibers International Juried Exhibition, the American Tapestry Alliance's Biennale 14, and Men Running with Scissors; in 2024 By Hand, "Craft Forms 2024 29th International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Fine Craft. My first solo exhibition VÄFT (Woven) was on display from March 3-May 5, 2025, in the Gallery of Handarbetes Vänners, in Stockholm, Sweden.  

I completed a Bachelor of Arts degree with advanced studies at the Swedish Textile Institute and at Handarbetets Vänners Vävskola (Stockholm). 

After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design with a ceramics major, Betty Busby founded a custom ceramic tile manufacturing firm in Los Angeles.  

After nearly 20 years of running the firm, she sold the business in 1994.  

Upon relocating to New Mexico, she changed the focus of her artwork to fiber, taking it full time in 2004.  

Her manufacturing background has led to constant experimentation with new materials and techniques that fuel her work.  

Originally inspired by Amish quilts at the Kutztown County Fair near her childhood home in Pennsylvania, her work has made the journey from bed quilts to mixed media sculpture and is constantly evolving and heading in new directions.  

The classic fractal structures of the sub microscopic world are a persistent model, as are natural processes, such as oxidation, replication, and growth.  

An artist using many media, from paint to pastels, felt, fabric, collage, and quilting, Phyllis is also an author of two books on portrait quilting, a teacher who has taught on four continents as well as virtually, a physician practicing at home and in developing countries, and a lifelong activist. Her art deals mainly with people and animals, telling stories, bearing witness to social and environmental issues, and celebrating family. Her work has been included in numerous national and international exhibits, museums, galleries, and collections, with multiple awards. She resides happily in her studio in north San Diego county with her husband and three cats who interfere with every art project.  

Sugandha Gupta is the Assistant Professor of Fashion Design and Materiality at Parsons School of Design. Born with albinism and visually impaired, Gupta creates sensory-textiles which are a collection of textiles and wearables that encourage audiences to engage through their sense of touch sound, smell, and sight. Gupta’s research interests are at the intersections of multi-sensory modes of art, design, and embodied justice. With over 18 years of experience in the textile industry and an established textile art practice, Gupta’s work is exhibited at The Guggenheim Museum, The Met Museum, UN Headquarters, Hunterdon Art Museum, The American Craft Council, and the Smithsonian Craft Show, among other museums and galleries. She has won prestigious awards such as The Dorthy Waxman Textile Prize, International Design Award, and CFDA Design Graduate.

Margaret Abramshe has been working in the arts for 40 years. A career artist and educator, she earned a degree in Art Education from Florida International University and a master's degree in Visual Art from the University of Northern Colorado.  

Her artwork has been juried into national and international exhibitions including exhibitions at the Schweinfurth Center in New York, The Smithsonian Textile Art Museum at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Visions Museum of Textile Art in San Diego California, The Sears Museum at Utah Tech University, and Saint George Art Museum.  

Margaret is a frequent contributor to Quilting Arts, Art Quilting Studio, and the SAQA Journal. Her quilt Joy appeared on the cover of the Fall 2023 Quilting Arts Magazine. She has also appeared in the last two seasons of Quilting Arts TV on PBS and in a digital download from Quilting Daily. On YouTube you can see interviews on SAQA's Textile Talks, and Lisa Walton's Quilt Stories.  

Margaret is represented by Juniper Sky Gallery in the Kayenta Arts Village and exhibits at various local galleries. Twenty-five of her portraits were featured in the Merging Lines exhibition at the Saint George Art Museum.  

Cameron Taylor-Brown was introduced to textiles by artist Ed Rossbach at the University of California, Berkeley, and studied textile design at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, where she later taught woven design. Since 1985, she has lived in Los Angeles where she is active in arts and education. Her work is widely exhibited and has been featured in Fiber Art Now, American Craft, Handwoven and Shuttle, Spindle and Dyepot. In 2019, she curated the critically acclaimed exhibit Material Meaning: A Living Legacy of Anni Albers at the Craft in America Center. She is the founder of ARTSgarage, a textile resource center in Los Angeles, and she teaches workshops at ARTSgarage, schools, guilds, museums, and conferences throughout the United States. She is a past president of California Fibers, serves on the board of Textile Arts LA, and is the current president of the UCLA Fowler Museum Textile Council.  

Denise is a textile/mixed media artist working in Fremont, CA. She was born in Maryland and moved to California in 1960. She has a degree in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley and worked in Information Technology for 30 years for the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program before retiring to work on her art full-time.                                                                                                                     

Her current work focuses on fiber/mixed media art, but she has also worked in other media. She has won many awards, and her works are in private and public collections. She is a member of the Valley Art Gallery in Walnut Creek, CA, and her work can be seen frequently at the Olive Hyde Art Gallery in Fremont, CA. She has also shown her work nationally and internationally and had pieces accepted into the Triennial of Tapestry in Lodz, Poland, Quilt National, and Quilt Visions. She has taught at the Empty Spools Seminars and multiple guild venues. She is a Juried Artist member of the Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) and has been a Regional Representative.  

I paint fabric, then search for narratives within the colors and shapes. Between what I see and what I intuit, a story unfolds. I collage the imagery, then stitch it into quilts and dolls.  

Dinah Sargeant is an artist who creates story quilts and dolls out of her hand-painted fabrics. She works intuitively in a direct, collage-like manner, often using raw edges with machine and hand stitching to create intricate and textured pieces. A California native, she graduated from California State University, Chico with an M.A. in painting in 1975. After graduating, she experimented with intaglio printmaking and worked as a graphic artist before merging her painting with textile art. Her work has been exhibited in international, national, and regional juried and invitational exhibits and is included in the Quilt National Permanent Collection at the International Quilt Study Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska.  

Her work is currently being exhibited at Quilt National 2025 in Athens, Ohio.  

Valerie Goodwin is a mixed media fiber artist and architect. Her fine art is featured in both museum and private collections. Much of her work draws inspiration from her fascination with aerial views of landscapes and cities, with many of her quilts designed based on maps.  

Goodwin's art reflects both real and imagined places. Some pieces highlight her architectural understanding of space, while others emphasize the intricate networks of urban design. Her compositions invite viewers to examine them from various perspectives, resembling a bird's eye view when seen from a distance.  

Sara is a longtime weaver, instructor, author, and studio artist. She has travelled the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia teaching workshops and giving lectures on weaving, dyeing, and spinning techniques. Newer to quilting, she is working with her own woven fabrics in art quilts and quilts for home use. Her books, published by Interweave Press, are Woven Treasures (2009), Spin to Weave (2013), and The Practical Guide to Spinning Silk (2014). 

I am a contemporary textile fiber artist. After graduating from college, raising two daughters, and retiring as an art teacher, I began a new career focused on my passion for weaving. Weaving had been part of the art department curriculum when I was teaching and quickly became one of my favorite lessons, so I was eager to explore it within my own artistic practices.  

The use of color and shape has been an important element in creating texture in my weavings, but I wanted to explore alternative methods and materials to bring a new dimension of tactile experiences to my art. I began incorporating the use of non-traditional techniques by weaving with various types of fibers, tree roots, zip ties, sisal, repurposed fabrics, and jute, as well as creating sculptural components through the use of PVC pipes and found objects. My artistic endeavors to push the boundaries of textile art have added new depth and dimension to my two-dimensional and three-dimensional weavings and sculptures.  

My weavings are being shown in exhibits across the country and Canada, in private homes, and in permanent museum collections. 

The daughter of an artist and a scientist, Niraja Lorenz began weaving as a teenager in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After high school, with a table loom and a foot locker of yarn, she explored the U.S. in her VW van visiting national parks and wilderness areas. Later she studied biology (B.A.) and psychology (Ph.D.). Quilting became her passion in 1994. After years of creating original pieces, she began studying with world-renowned fiber artist Nancy Crow in 2007. Her work quickly evolved as she discovered that she had a unique visual voice. She currently splits her time between her studio in Eugene and working to protect democracy. 

Lorenz has exhibited extensively throughout North America, as well as in Europe, Australia, and Asia. Recent awards include: 2025 Award of Excellence, Form Not Function, Carnegie Center, New Albany IN; 2024 Exhibition & Documentation Grant, Ford Family Foundation, Roseburg OR; 2024 Honorable Mention, New Legacies Contemporary Art Quilts, Lincoln Center, Fort Collins CO; 2023 Honorable Mention, Fantastic Fibers, Yeiser Art Center, Paducah KY; 2023 Award for Color Artistry, Interpretations, Visions Museum of Textile Art, San Diego, CA; 2022 Best of Show, Quilt Visions, Visions Museum of Textile Art, San Diego, CA; 2021 Award of Merit, CraftForms, Wayne Art Center, Wayne, PA; 2019 Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts, Ford Family Foundation, Roseburg OR. 

Meredith Strauss began her love of textiles as a young child learning to knit and crochet from her grandmother. After years of exploring on her own, she earned an undergraduate degree in Fiber Art from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1978. Additionally, she spent one year weaving in San Miguel Allende, Mexico, and spent her junior year abroad at a weaving school in Stockholm, Sweden. Upon graduation, Meredith moved to Los Angeles and began work on her Masters Degree at the University of California at Los Angeles. Further research during this time took her to Peru and Bolivia on a Travel and Research Grant. Upon completion of her MFA degree in 1983, Meredith pursued exhibiting large scale weavings both nationally and internationally, including in Japan, Switzerland, the Philippines, Turkey, and Korea.   

Meredith has completed many private and public corporate art commissions that are included in the collections of AT&T, Hilton Hotels, Hallmark Cards, Chevron's Corporate Headquarter, Stanford University, and the Rhode Island School of Design.  In the 1980's, Meredith began teaching part time, first at the American College and later at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise, Woodbury University, and El Camino College. A highlight in her career has been leading Cloth and Culture travel abroad tours to Italy, Turkey, Thailand, and Uzbekistan. 

Maggy Rozycki Hiltner is a full-time studio artist and activist living in Red Lodge, Montana.  She earned a BFA in Sculpture with a concentration in Fibers from Syracuse University and was a Studio Assistant at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. For over 25 years now, she has been collaging found embroidery and quilts with her hand-stitched imagery, giving these abandoned textiles new meaning and relevance. As a member of SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates), she served as a Regional Representative for Montana and Idaho and is currently their Regional Exhibitions Coordinator. Her work has been published and exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally, and she was a 2015 recipient of the Montana Arts Council Artist's Innovation Award.  

Rebecca Edwards, born in 1959 in Lansing, Michigan, is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, California. Her practice spans sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, with a unique focus on incorporating both found materials and artist-made objects. Edwards is best known for her unexpected juxtapositions of fabric, fur, and organic matter with familiar objects such as kitchen utensils, rabbits, and baby bottle nipples. She uses these elements to construct a shorthand recording society's expectations of women.   

Edwards' work explores the basic themes of feminine experience, focusing on the tension between traditional roles and the modern reality they ignore. Employing humor and enticing materials, she invites viewers to confront complex and often unsettling issues. In one sculpture an oversized bronze bra supports a four-foot nest composed of twigs and string entangled with brightly colored combs; juggling demanding standards of grooming with active motherhood is overwhelming. Another recent work features an immersive installation composed of dead branches and rusted kitchen utensils stacked in ceramic tubes, creating a forest littered with withered leaves—an evocative metaphor for the decay of domestic and feminine ideals.   

Rebecca Edwards has exhibited widely, including a solo exhibition at Don O'Melveny Gallery in Santa Monica, California, and a group show at the Wignall Museum in Rancho Cucamonga, California. Her work has been recognized with several awards, including a Residency Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, First Place in the 78th Crocker-Kingsley Juried Exhibition in Roseville, California, and the Associates Award at the Brand 49th annual, On Paper, in Glendale, California. Edwards' works are held in numerous private collections. 

Kevin Womack, a textile artist from Lynchburg, Virginia, began quilting in 1986, taught by his maternal grandmother. Inspired by family quilts made from scrap fabrics, he explored pattern and cloth, developing a passion for fiber art. Kevin specializes in hand dyeing and surface design techniques to create unique fabrics for his quilts.

His work has been featured in regional and national exhibitions, including Quilt National ’13 and Quilt Visions Biennial 2014. He won Best in Show at Quilts=Art=Quilts 2021 and the Award of Excellence at Form, Not Function: Quilt Art 2023. Kevin also teaches and lectures nationally.

Laurie Paquin is a contemporary abstract quilter whose work explores the interplay of line, form, color, and spatial relationships in graphic, pieced, and stitched textile compositions. With a background as a multidisciplinary artist her earlier sculptural work included metalwork, woodwork, bronze casting, papier-mâché sculpture, clay modelling and casting, and puppet-making.

Her recent discovery of contemporary quilting sparked an interest in creating large-scale, abstract quilts. Drawing on formal design principles, intuitive response, and detailed construction, her quilts evoke movement and pattern, loosely reference architectural structures and layered landscapes, and hint at creature-like forms. Her work explores the relationship between built and organic forms, softness and structure, and permanence and impermanence.

Theda Sandiford is an interdisciplinary artist based in St. Croix, USVI, known for her innovative fiber and installation art. Her work explores racial trauma and collective memory through weaving, coiling, and knotting, often using found materials and community-sourced objects to create what she calls a “social fabric”—interweaving personal stories with contemporary issues.

Rooted in community engagement, Sandiford leads collaborative, site-specific art experiences that spark dialogue around equity, sustainability, and well-being. Her practice highlights the transformative power of creativity and collective action.

Sandiford’s work has been exhibited internationally and is part of the permanent collections at the Guggenheim Museum and Pittsburgh Children’s Museum. She has shown at World of Threads, Expo Chicago, Untitled Art Fair, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, and the American Contemporary Craft National Juried Exhibition. Her honors include recognition by Fiber Art Now, the 2020 Jersey City Visual Artist Award, a 2021 NJ State Council on the Arts Craft Fellowship, a 2022 JCAC Fellowship, and the 2023–24 National Leaders of Color Fellowship.

Linda Fjeldsted Blust has been working with fabric all her life, first as a hobbyist and later as a ballroom dance costume designer. She also operated an online business selling her ornate custom Christmas stockings, handbags, and home décor items.  

These days she combines her sewing skills with her love of nature, creating intricate bird sculptures out of cloth and wire and embellishing them with many of the same elaborate trimmings that once adorned her ballroom gowns.  

Her large-as-life textile birds have appeared in museums, quilt shows, and art festivals and have won numerous awards and accolades. They have also been featured in several magazines, including Quilting Arts and Art Quilting Studio, and many now reside in private collections all over the world.

Serena Brooks, a native of Houston and a graduate of the University of Texas, has a busy psychotherapy practice in Los Angeles. When not seeing clients, she can be found in her studio creating art. She greatly enjoys this work/life balance and the integration of both. Her contemporary quilts have been exhibited internationally, and her work is currently being exhibited in several venues throughout the U.S.

Born in Mexico City, Viviana studied art at La Esmeralda, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. She also holds a degree in Translation and Conference Interpretation from the Instituto de Intérpretes y Traductores in Mexico City. In 1981 she earned a degree in Visual Arts from UCSD.

Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is represented in many collections.

She lives and works in San Diego, CA.

Surface design and patterning have influenced Deborah Kruger’s work since her textile design training at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.  She has taught, lectured, and exhibited throughout the US, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and Australia since the 1980s.

Kruger’s art practice balances making objects of beauty that convey layered meaning about habitat fragmentation, bird migration, species extinction, and loss of indigenous languages. Her artwork is made with recycled plastic and screen-printed with images of endangered birds and languages.

Current career highlights include winning the Grand Prize of the Keller Prize and the First Prize for the Wynnewood Juried Art Show in Miami; selection of artwork for the Art in Embassies program (now on view at the US embassy in Turkmenistan – 2025); Coined in the South: 2024 Biennial at the Mint Museum in Charlotte (Dec 2024 – April 2025); Solo exhibition at the Block Gallery in Raleigh (Dec 2024 – April 2025); Visiting Artist at Duke University Art Department (2025); exhibiting in Venice, Italy, in the finalist exhibition for the Arte Laguna Prize, and currently in the International Fiber Art Biennial at the Museum of Textiles in Valtopina, Italy. The Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York City recently acquired two large environmental pieces.

Kruger has attended residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, NY, (1991); La Porte Peinte Centre, Noyers-sur-Serein, France, (2016); Hypatia-in-the-Woods, Shelton, WA, (2022) and the Icelandic Textile Center in Blondus, Iceland, (2024).

Kruger has studios in the lively arts community in Durham, North Carolina, and in the lakeside village of Chapala, Mexico, where she has a team-based production studio that provides jobs and empowerment to local Mexican women.

Joyce Melander is an artist fascinated by the constructed object. Using a variety of processes such as weaving, crochet, embroidery, and sewing, the artist’s intricately assembled sculptures carry traditional craft methods into the context of fine art.

She incorporates a wide array of materials in her work, bringing wool, glass beads, textiles, and wood veneers into a rich, almost musical, interplay of texture and rhythm.

She lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a place whose desert landscape and crisp, bright colors inspire the artist’s vividly hued palette and organic shapes. Melander brings this inspiration into the studio, not to duplicate the outside world, but to synthesize her surroundings and observations into something entirely new.

A lifelong pianist, Melander plays daily, incorporating musical terms into many of her titles: Rondo, Allegro Non Troppo, Glissando. Her elaborately patterned, delicately worked sculptures, often arranged in lilting, organic configurations, bring to mind the musical abstractions of Kandinsky, whose fascination with the “sound of color” established the artist as a pioneer of western abstraction. Melander’s approach is a more postmodern one, preoccupied with artisanal process, material opulence, and extravagant construction.

Her work is held in numerous public collections throughout the country, and has been exhibited in numerous galleries and institutions, including June Kelly Gallery, New York; Salon de Mars, Paris, France; the Tennessee State Museum, Nashville; Aaron Payne Fine Art, Santa Fe; and many others.

Using fabric as my primary material, I create mixed media works that combine art quilts with collage, printmaking, drawing, painting, stitching, and more. In 2020, I begun working with washi paper, adding it to my artwork alongside kimonos and hand-dyed fabrics. Creating washi paper involves layering paper fibers floating in water and incorporating the fabric and fibers. The randomness of the water’s flow intertwines with my own intentions, resulting in unexpected expressions.

I have also been thrilled by the colors and luster of Japanese vintage fabrics such as satin and meisen, which have been crafted with Japanese sensibilities for many years. As my collection of materials expanded, my expression and the images I want to create also expanded. Now it seems that I often create works guided by attractive materials. Creating isn’t something special; it’s simply a matter of accumulating random moments from everyday life, scenes that catch my eye, and materials that I am drawn to, from my own perspective. I hope to continue this as a simple, everyday act, rather than something special.

Mary-Ellen Latino is a mixed media artist known for her textured artworks that explore themes of nature, protection, and human history. Her work often combines both abstract and representational forms, reflecting her fascination with the relationship between art and textiles, as the words “text” and “textile” share the Latin root texere, meaning to weave or construct.

Mary-Ellen began creating her own fabric in 1990. Using dyes and other surface design techniques, she seeks to create cloth full of energy and life. Her passions for fiber and photography have now merged to create cloth statements full of color, line, movement, and images used in repetition or abstractly, printed on silk charmeuse with its sumptuous luster, inner glow, and glorious colors.

Her work has traveled around the country, exhibiting in galleries and museums worldwide, including traveling SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) exhibits in Europe, throughout New England, the New England Quilt Museum, and along the east and west coasts.

For over 25 years, Cathie has been weaving on the shores of the Salish Sea in the Pacific Northwest, drawing deep inspiration from the surrounding sea and mountains. Since 2013, she has showcased her handwoven wall pieces in group shows and juried exhibitions, captivating audiences with works that celebrate the textures and rhythms of nature.

Cathie is a technical weaver at heart, fascinated by complex structures that break away from traditional vertical and horizontal patterns. Early in her career, she gravitated toward doubleweave—a technique that allows multiple layers of cloth to interact in surprising ways. Through doubleweave, she creates sculptural forms, such as textured tubes and airy, ethereal hangings woven from fine threads.

Her curiosity extends beyond weaving itself. Cathie has explored the art of dyeing, even cultivating her own dye plants to experiment with natural color. This passion led her to ikat, a resist-dyeing technique that infuses her work with flowing, organic hues.

After a brief hiatus, Cathie returned to the loom in 2023 with a new focus: weaving pleats. This exploration has opened up a fresh avenue of creativity, and she continues to develop innovative variations on pleated textiles.

Cathie is currently a member of the Port Townsend Gallery, a cooperative gallery in Port Townsend, Washington, where she shares her evolving body of work with the community.

Bobbi Baugh is a self-employed artist working from her home studio in DeLand, Florida. Previously, Bobbi had a career of 30+ years in commercial printing: sales/customer service, graphic design, and stationery product design. Bobbi is a graduate of Stetson University. Her undergraduate studies included a double major in studio art and speech communication. She received her master’s from Stetson in humanities and education. Bobbi is an active volunteer in the DeLand community. She is a juried artist member of Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA). She serves the Florida Region as newsletter editor, catalog designer, and chair of the exhibition committee. Bobbi has exhibited widely in juried competitions, global exhibitions, gallery and museum events, and solo shows.

Having discovered textiles as a fine art medium in 2011, Bobbi has developed a narrative body of work focusing on the inner journey of a young girl. Using that interest in exploring what is unseen, Bobbi also explores landscapes in collaged paper abstract works and collaged and stitched fabric art quilts.

Bobbi Baugh’s work is an invitation to look beyond the surface. Inspired by the relationship between what is seen and what is not seen, Bobbi has created a narrative body of work focused on the inner journey of a young girl. She also creates abstracted landscapes that give voice to what is hidden or beneath the observed natural reality. Bobbi finds collage with hand printed fabrics to be the perfect medium for what interests her: low-tech, hands-on explorations of layers.

Having both a degree in law and art history from the École du Louvre, Chrystel Floriot pursued a legal career for 10 years before deciding to fully devote herself to an artistic career (painter, sculptor, visual artist).  Initially a watercolorist and pastelist, she quickly expanded her palette to other techniques and alternated between figurative and abstract periods.

From 2005 to 2019, she settled in South Asia. This new destination was a source of inspiration and allowed her to explore new materials, and she increasingly varied the media she used (inks, acrylics, pastels, and collages, etc.).  An award won in Kuala Lumpur opened doors to prestigious art galleries and auctions and prompted both private and public commissions in Asia and France.

To provide insight into her work, she has never hesitated to create works in public, conduct workshops to share her techniques, give classes and lectures in art and design schools, and use her art to support charities.  Once back to France, she moved to a new technique that involves layering of different materials. Initially made of metal, she later turned to fabric, having always been familiar with the world of couture (her mother and grandmother were seamstresses). It was therefore quite natural for her to use hemstitched fabrics (lace, tulle, embroidery, veil) as new raw materials to explore artistically.

She regularly exhibits in galleries and salons. In 2025, she exhibited at, among other places, Art Capital at Grand Palais in Paris, Contemporary Artists’ Fair in Versailles, and variousgalleries in France (la Baule, Monaco, St Jean Cap Ferrat) and in Asia (Jakarta, Singapore).  She was recently a winner and finalist in the Printemps des arts competition (the theme of which was “between the lines”), 9th edition Villa Cathala House of Arts at Noisy le Grand (suburb of Paris) and received the Audience Favorite Prize.  She also participated in the competition to become an Army Painter of the French National Gendarmerie (the result of which is still pending).

I am a Hungarian and Russian origin textile artist, living in France. I especially love to tell stories with my creations. When I was younger, I worked in a theater as a playwright and kept a liking for staging. My quilts are time suspended, an instant when everything stops, but you can always imagine what was happening before and what will come after. There’s an intensity to that precise moment, a delicate and sometimes dramatic one. Visually, my artworks are also intense, a baroque luxury of details, an abundance of colors and emotions. Beyond my imagination, I’m guided by spiritual connection. Technically, I find improbable associations of materials, such as metal and acrylic pouring on plastic or paper. As an active SAQA Europe/Middle East region member, I initiated the Orient Express – An Artistic Train Ride Through Europeexhibition. My works are exhibited worldwide.

Based in suburban Detroit, fiber artist Diane Nunez transforms her background in landscape architecture into a dynamic exploration of form and material. Using non-traditional elements, her award-winning works resonate across public and private collections worldwide and have been spotlighted in top-tier art publications. As one observer noted, Nunez’s creations are a testament to the resilience and ingenuity of fiber artists who refuse to be confined.

Hanna Wojdała–Markowska was born in 1964 in Radom, Poland.

She graduated from the Faculty of Textile and Clothing at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Łódź in 1990. In 1998, at the same school, she obtained her first degree qualification (PhD) in visual arts, with an artistic discipline in design. In 2007, at The Fine Arts Academy in Warsaw, she completed her post-doctoral studies and received the title of Associate Professor in the area of visual arts and the discipline of fine arts. Hanna has worked as a university professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Radom since 1996. Since 1991, she has been a member of the Association of Polish Visual Artists and has resided in the Warsaw District for close to a decade.

In 2021, she received a scholarship from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage for the promotion of culture. She works in the field of artistic textiles, painting, and unique clothing.

Throughout her career, she’s received dozens of medals, awards, and distinctions for textiles and paintings.

She took part in over 250 international, national, and environmental exhibitions, organized over 40 individual exhibitions, and has presented several shows of her own clothing.

Susan Allred is a mixed media artist who works primarily with fiber to explore the ways it affects and reflects our daily lives.   

In May 2022, Does Your Armor Grow was awarded First Place at the 2022 Annual Juried Art Show. In May 2020, Allred’s mixed media piece Invitation to a Tea Party was awarded Best in Show at Mesa Community College’s 2020 Annual Juried Student Art Show. In July 2020, she received a grant from The Carmody Foundation’s Art For Good Arizona Project. In 2019, her fiber sculpture Bound was selected to appear at the Eric Fischl Vanguard Showcase, at the Phoenix Art Museum and in the Eric Fischl Gallery, where it was awarded Second Place in the 3D Media category.  

Allred was an artist member at Eye Lounge contemporary art space from February 2020 to May 2023 and served as co-president from January 2022 to May 2023. During a three-month residency at the Ceramics Research Center at the ASU Art Musuem, Allred was given the time and space to scale up her work, and she created two large versions of her Walking Skirts series, which explore the costs women pay for exercising their freedoms.  

She lives and works in Tempe, Arizona.  

Eden Quispe is a textile artist and art teacher who creates in both her home and classroom studios in Newton, Kansas. Her work is inspired by the children and young adults around her and reflects on textiles, domesticity, and childrearing.

Although Quispe is a native of Kansas, she lived in Perú for 5 years absorbing the culture, history, and textile-focused art of the country, even studying for a short while at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in downtown Lima. Her tapestries are informed by her mixed-race household, incorporating textiles from both her heritage and the heritage of her husband’s Peruvian culture.

She has an MFA in painting from Fort Hays State University and has exhibited in art fairs put on by SCOPE and the Wichita Art Museum, as well as solo and group exhibitions in Brooklyn, Miami, St. Louis, New Albany, and Cincinnati.