Bart Niswonger is a furni­ture maker in western Mass­a­chu­setts. His work explores complex surface pattern and texture, employ­ing tech­niques from hand carving to computer controlled routing as well as a broad range of mate­ri­als. He received the John D. Mineck Furni­ture Fellow­ship in 2011, and has been a member of The Furni­ture Society since 2004.

Maggie Sasso received her BFA in wood­work­ing and metal­smithing from Murray State Univer­sity in 2006. During this time she served as Student Repre­sen­ta­tive on the Board of Trustees for the Furni­ture Society. In 2010 she received her MFA from the Univer­sity of Wiscon­sin — Madison where she made many bodies of work, includ­ing the Mobile Museum of Mate­r­ial Culture, a collab­o­ra­tive grant funded project featured in a docu­men­tary. In Fall 2010 she taught at the Oregon College of Art and Craft for one semes­ter in the wood­work­ing depart­ment, and worked as a visit­ing artist. In 2011 she moved to Milwau­kee, WI where she received a Mary L. Nohl Fellow­ship and works at the Milwau­kee Insti­tute of Art and Design where she is the Sewing Lab Tech­ni­cian and teaches adjunct in the foun­da­tions, new studio prac­tice and indus­trial design departments.

Sarah Marriage lives and works in Balti­more, MD where she is the founder and direc­tor of A Work­shop of Our Own, a non-profit educa­tional wood­shop created by and for women and gender non-conform­ing indi­vid­u­als, with a mission to provide train­ing, advo­cacy and oppor­tu­nity for people under­rep­re­sented by gender in the field of furni­ture making and wood­work­ing. Sarah studied archi­tec­ture at Prince­ton Univer­sity and fine wood­work­ing at The College of the Redwoods (now The Krenov School). She is a member of the Board of Trustees of The Furni­ture Society. She has been a visit­ing artist at Herron School of Art & Design, a studio fellow at the Center for Furni­ture Crafts­man­ship, and a John D Mineck furni­ture fellow. She has taught at The Krenov School, Penland School of Craft, Ander­son Ranch Arts Center, and Haystack Moun­tain School of Craft. Sarah’s­work has shown at galleries and trade shows across the US, includ­ing juried exhi­bi­tions within Dwell on Design (CA), ICFF (NY), the Amer­i­can Craft Council Show (MD), and Pritam & Eames Gallery (NY).

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Kathy Sharp is owner of Keystone Profes­sional Solu­tions and a long­time volun­teer with the Furni­ture Society. She is married to Alf Sharp, a furni­ture maker, former board member, and past pres­i­dent. Many will know Kathy from her activ­i­ties orga­niz­ing the Silent Auction at conferences.

Michael Jean Cooper was born in Rich­mond, Cali­for­nia in 1943 and grew up in Lodi, Cali­for­nia. Mike holds a B.A. in Commer­cial Art and M.A. in Sculp­ture from San Jose State College, as well as a M.F.A in Sculp­ture from U.C. Berke­ley. He taught Furni­ture Design, Sculp­ture, and 3D Design as an Instruc­tor of Art for 34 years at Foothill-DeAnza College in Cuper­tino, CA, retir­ing in 2004.

During his profes­sional career Michael has been honored with numer­ous awards and fellow­ships. Michael has partic­i­pated in multi­ple one-man and group shows and is repre­sented in various publi­ca­tions as well as private and public collec­tions. He currently lives in Sebastopol, Cali­for­nia where he works daily in his studio adja­cent to his home. He typi­cally works in wood and metal or a combi­na­tion of both, combin­ing organic and geomet­ric forms with kinetic elements.

Forest Dickey initially came to the Board as the Student Repre­sen­ta­tive, and also served as the Vice Pres­i­dent of the Board.

Karen Ernst is a Profes­sor in the Art Depart­ment at Edin­boro Univer­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia, where she has been teach­ing wood­work­ing and furni­ture design since 2004. Orig­i­nally from East Aurora, NY, she received a B.A. in Studio Art from SUNY Geneseo, and her M.F.A in Furni­ture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. She main­tains an active studio prac­tice, exhibit­ing the furni­ture and sculp­tural objects she makes across the U.S. She has been a member of the Furni­ture Society since 2002.

Thomas Hucker began his illus­tri­ous career by under­go­ing a rigor­ous appren­tice­ship with German master cabi­net­maker Leonard Hilger and then contin­ued his train­ing under master-crafts­man Jere Osgood at Boston University’s Program in Arti­sanry. The strong artis­tic and tech­ni­cal base Osgood’s and Hilger’s instruc­tions provided paved the way for Hucker’s provoca­tive and concep­tu­ally engag­ing work that was to come.

Over the many years Hucker has been active in the furni­ture field, he received grants from The Fragrance Foun­da­tion in New York; from Fulbright-Hays in Indus­trial Design at Domus Academy in Milan, Italy; and two National Endow­ment for the Arts awards. Hucker is a five-times awardee by I.D. Magazine’s Annual Design Review. He has taught at the Pratt Insti­tute, the New York School of Design, Cali­for­nia College of the Arts, and the Appalachian Center for Crafts in Tennessee. Hucker’s work is in the perma­nent collec­tions of the Museum of Arts & Design and the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York; the Detroit Museum of Art, MI; the Los Angeles County Museum, CA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Mint Museum, Char­lotte, NC; and The Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion of Amer­i­can Art, Wash­ing­ton, DC .

Hucker received the Furni­ture Society’s Award of Distinc­tion in 2016 and has most recently been made an Amer­i­can Craft Council Fellow (October 2018).

Adam John Manley was born and raised in the Adiron­dacks of Upstate New York. His Father was a carpen­ter and boat builder, and his mother a weaver. After attend­ing SUNY New Paltz, in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he received a BA in Inter­na­tional Rela­tions and Polit­i­cal Science, Adam fell in love with wood­work­ing and furni­ture making. After college, he and a small group of craft-based artists started a small gallery and coop­er­a­tive studio, in Kingston New York called ​“the Fire­house”. Adam Received his MFA in Furni­ture and Wood­work­ing from San Diego State Univer­sity in 2012, where he focused his work on sculp­tural objects using furni­ture as a point of depar­ture. The work explores the rela­tion­ship between people, places, and objects. Since receiv­ing his MFA, Adam has exhib­ited nation­ally from San Diego to Maine, includ­ing shows at Space Gallery in Port­land Maine, The Hunter­don Museum in Clinton New Jersey, The Ocean­side Museum in Ocean­side Cali­for­nia, UW Madison’s galleries, and the Kipp Gallery in Indiana Pennsylvania.

Head of the Wood/​Furniture Design Area and an Assis­tant Profes­sor in the Depart­ment of Craft/​Material Studies, at Virginia Common­wealth University’s School of the Arts (VCUarts) from 2012 – 2019, Heath Matysek-Snyder is an object maker whose multi-faceted studio prac­tice
incor­po­rates wood­work­ing, furni­ture, design and sculp­ture. Earning his BFA from VCUarts in 2000 and his MFA from the Univer­sity of Wiscon­sin-Madison in 2004, Heath has been an Artist-in-Resi­dence at San Diego State Univer­sity, Designed Objects Tasma­nia; Hobart, Australia, the College of Design and Inno­va­tion at Tongji Univer­sity; Shang­hai, China, and has partic­i­pated at the Emma Inter­na­tional Collab­o­ra­tion, in Ness Creek, Saskatchewan.

Jennifer-Navva Milliken is the Artis­tic Direc­tor for The Center for Art in Wood. Prior to her arrival at the Center, she served as an embed­ded staff member in inter­na­tional art museums, as an inde­pen­dent curator, and as the founder of a cross-disci­pli­nary art space. Her exhi­bi­tions have been presented in museums, art fairs, galleries, and uncon­ven­tional spaces, and her writ­ings have been seen in exhi­bi­tion cata­logues, antholo­gies, and publi­ca­tions that inves­ti­gate and critique the inter­sect­ing fields of art, craft, and design. With a global perspec­tive, honed through a life split between two conti­nents, she is driven by the extra­or­di­nary power of the arts to chal­lenge precon­cep­tions and bridge divides.