Teaching Artists
At the Western New York Book Arts Center we believe in supporting teaching artists in our community by providing opportunities to share their skills. Get to know the artists that make Book Arts a vibrant space to learn and create!
We’re always looking to share the work of local artists.
We accept workshop ideas from both established and emerging artists in a variety of book arts mediums, including various methods of printmaking, bookmaking, papermaking, calligraphy, and more.
Interested in sharing your skills by teaching a class at Book Arts? Fill out this form to learn more and we’ll get in touch!
TEACHING ARTISTS - Submit your * NEW * workshop proposal information here
Teaching Artist Workshop Submission
BOOK ARTS TEACHING ARTISTS
Jameson Alea
Jameson Alea (they/he) is an artist and poet whose work is informed by their interests in history, magic, and alchemy. They were born and raised in the Buffalo area and graduated from Canisius College with a degree in digital art and computer science, which led them to a career as a software engineer, public speaker and podcast producer.
Nevertheless, Jamey remains passionate about art, working in various mediums, but particularly letterpress. They completed a studio residency at Book Arts in early 2022, producing a 28 card hand-printed deck called the Tarot of Sorts. They have been doing letterpress for about two years and reading tarot for about six.
Kathie Aspaas
Kathie Aspaas is a printmaker working in mixed media collage and alternative print on paper and printed soft sculpture on fabric. Sometimes making organic dyes and printing with roots, leaves and feathers, she gathers inspiration from artists like Max Ernst, Wangeche Mutu, Hannah Hoch and Swoon, just to name a few. Kathie has a BFA in Printmaking, having studied with Harvey Breverman at University at Buffalo and holds an MA in Art History with a minor in Native American Art. Kathie has had a NY Certification in Visual Arts and has taught art K-12 and College and University level. Kathie is the owner of Aspen House Press, and does everything from publishing for other talented people to showing her own work in Galleries and for commercial purposes.
Diane Bond
Diane Bond is a Roycroft Renaissance Master Artisan in book arts and has been making books for over 20 years. She is a member of the WNY Book Arts Center and has served on their Board of Directors. A graduate of Buffalo State College, Diane has a bachelor’s degree in both graphic design and art education and a master’s in art education. She has been a visiting artist to many area schools, worked as an art educator teaching students grades K-12 and has taught numerous bookmaking workshops across Western New York.
Emma Brittain
Emma Brittain (she/her) is a teaching artist based in Buffalo, NY. She holds a Bachelors of Science in Theology and Art from Houghton University. Currently she teaches at Locust Street Art, The Foundry, and with Arts for Learning WNY. She loves teaching and practicing many different art disciplines including sculpture, printmaking, drawing, and painting. She has recently exhibited work in Box Gallery and Buffalo Art Movement.
Caitlin Caldwell
Caitlin Caldwell (she/her) is a printer & designer living in Buffalo. She started interning at the Book Arts Center in 2010 while studying Communication Design and Printmaking at the University at Buffalo. Caitlin now works in the printshop at Roswell Parkand enjoys teaching letterpress classes in the printshop where she learned to print!
Rachel DeCicco
Rachel (she/her) is a screen printer and illustrator from Kingston, New York. After graduating from Ringling College of Art and Design with her BFA in illustration she came to Buffalo and began interning with Book Arts! After her residency with Book Arts she began working as a graphic artist in Grand Island and continues to create her own work in her spare time.
Nathan Deganis-Librera
Deganis-Librera is a screen printer and illustrator from Buffalo, NY. He started screen printing in 2014, and has worked in several very different shops printing thousands of orders from small local businesses to epic clients. Since then, he has started his own business screen printing his original artwork, from hand-printed shirts & totes, to band posters and more.
Ben Dunkle
Ben Dunkle is a designer, artist, and teacher in Buffalo. He has taught courses in graphic design, web design, and programming at Canisius College since 2001. Ben has an MFA in Printmaking from SUNY Buffalo.
Debra Eck
Deb Eck (she/her) is a mixed media artist who works primarily with paper, thread, and text. Her work features a characteristic concern with repetition, the evidence of the maker’s hand, and women’s work. Her recent artist’s books have focused on the translation of traditional embroidery techniques into functional binding patterns. Her functional books and journals use post-consumer recycled materials and fabric to create practical beauty from rubbish. In addition to her studio practice, she directs the Pearl City Clay House program for Infinity Visual and Performing Arts, and teaches classes and workshops for numerous other arts and cultural organizations both regionally and nationally. She received her MA in Visual Culture from Northumbria University in Newcastle, England and her BFA from the University at Buffalo, where she graduated as the Dean’s Medalist in Fine Arts.
Tami Fuller
Tami Fuller is a second-generation fiber artist and works as an educator and working artist out of East Aurora. Her work integrates the traditional foundations of hand-constructed processes with modern technique. Her workshops are designed with an eye toward revitalizing and modernizing fiber, ensuring the continuation of these skill sets by exposing the art form to new people within new contexts. She was trained in ebru marbling on fabric in her youth and has refined her process on paper and on silk. She teaches retreats and workshops throughout the North East and the Pacific Northwest, where her family has a large sheep farm that specializes in breed conservation for rare or at-risk breeds of sheep. Her work has received awards from NY Sheep and Wool and the Carnegie Art Center. In 2022, she was defined as a WNY artist culture-maker and a recipient of the NY Council on the Arts “Creatives Rebuild NY” grant, tasked with rebuilding arts access post-COVID. She has shown in several solo and group shows locally and her work can be found in collections in the United States and Australia.
Leanne Goldblatt
Leanne (she/her) is a New York born and based practitioner, mother, and teacher currently living in Buffalo, NY. She received a Masters of Fine Arts from her alma mater, the University at Buffalo. She is an interdisciplinary maker currently working across mediums of print, sculpture, fiber, and digital media. Leanne’s practice is a skill-based, hand-made aesthetic with an obsessive tendency towards streamlining repetitive, production-style processes.
Through crude depictions of unusual autobiographical memories, Goldblatt’s stories are a sarcastic, sometimes deadpan, treatment of family trauma in which the construction of truth acts as a divisive mechanism for control and abuse. Her interests rest on how sexuality, identity, gender and ethics developed in a totalitarian system.
Miranda Heyer
Miranda Heyer has been volunteering with the WNY Book Arts Center since 2017. Her purpose was to gain experience with her job coach from Aspire of WNY. Since then, she has been leading workshops in Monster Tail looming and origami. Miranda also helps with demos at events such as Book Fest, Last Minute Panic, and Edible Book. Miranda is working towards a career involving arts and crafts and when she’s not pursuing her career goals or helping Book Arts, she’s filling orders for her Etsy account.
Sweety Kabra
Sweety Kabra started at Book Arts as a volunteer, assisting teaching artists conduct workshops. Through volunteering she learned screen printing, book binding and letterpress, and eventually went on to lead workshops of her own! Sweety is passionate about paper craft and learning new art, and likes that Book Arts offersa space to create, teach art, and make a difference. Sweety loves to do Henna, and also runs her own small business, WNY Henna Designs, which combines her love of art with the traditions her home country of India. When she’s not leading a Book Arts Printing Partners workshop in the community or helping out in the shop at Book Arts, you’ll most likely find Sweety leading one of her Henna parties!
Richard Kegler
In addition to being the founder of the WNY Book Arts Center, Richard Kegler is the founding partner of P22 type foundry, which originated in 1994 as an outgrowth of his Master’s thesis project on Marcel Duchamp. Rich’s background in typography and book arts includes ventures in bookbinding and letterpress printing. However, the historical context and background of type continue to be his greatest interest and shape the evolution of P22. From 2014-2018, Kegler was the Director of the Book Arts Center at Wells College, in Aurora, NY, which hosts a myriad of book arts related workshops, events and residencies, in addition to an on-campus shop, The Wells College Press. Currently, Rich is in Rochester, NY, building a new home for P22 type foundry.
Katharyn Ketter-Franklin
Katy (they/them) is a 30 year old Canisius College graduate from Buffalo, NY focusing on illustration, photography, and paper cut artwork. They spend their free time rewatching Evangelion and Star Wars, playing Final Fantasy, photographing cosplayers, and creating movie posters for North Park Theatre.
Kara Mather
Kara (she/they) is a mild-mannered engineer by day, and ferocious craftsperson by night. She enjoys attending makers classes, including Book Arts book binding and letterpress workshops; building and creating using any and every medium; and inspiring others to do the same. Kara‘s favorite projects so far are the cedar strip Greenland kayak, Irish chain quilt, and various unit origami models which decorate her office.
Ruby Merritt
Ruby Merritt is a Western New York, Buffalo based professional artist, adjunct professor and teaching artist. Merritt received her BFA, concentrating in Drawing and Painting from the State University of New York at New Paltz and a Masters of Fine Arts at the University at Buffalo, in 2013.
A familiar niche for Merritt’s artwork is the contemporary ‘art and science’ or ‘bio-art’ realm. Producing work that is process based, using earth cycles, such as rock and water cycles, to manipulate and nurture her work. Printmaking, photography and bookmaking have become an incipient nesting ground for displaying and capturing the shapes and patterns mimicking and documenting nature’s visual wonder.
Believing that we need to perceive the natural world as art objects, Merritt frequently shares her experiences, techniques and instructs hand made projects as a Teaching Artist for Book Arts workshops and the Printing Partners program.
Tom Rooney
Tom Rooney is a printmaker and illustrator living in Buffalo, NY. He holds a BFA in printmaking from the State University College at Buffalo, NY and an MFA in printmaking from Drake University. From 1997 to 2011 he was the owner and operator of Pavlov’s Togs, a popular retail store and screen printing studio located in the heart of Buffalo’s Elmwood Village. The shop featured clothing and other items printed with his designs. He closed the store to concentrate on his personal work, focusing on relief printing, watercolor painting and ink drawing. This work can be seen on his website.
Talia Ryan
Talia Ryan (she/her) is a printmaker, and teaching artist at Buffalo Academy of Science High School. She is a lifelong resident of Buffalo, NY; and in addition to her residency show at the WNY Book Arts Center in September 2021, she has exhibited work at PAUSA Art House, the Castellani Art Museum, and the Nazareth College Colacino Gallery.
Mizin Shin
Born and raised in South Korea, Mizin Shin graduated from Hong-ik University with a B.F.A in Printmaking and received her M.F.A from SUNY at Buffalo. Leading numerous printmaking workshops with a number of art organizations, Shin focuses on both traditional and contemporary printmaking practices to promote a multidisciplinary approach to the medium.
Shin’s work has been shown nationally and internationally at institutions across the United States, the UK, Spain, and South Korea in exhibitions including Multiple Ones: Contemporary Perspectives in Printmedia, Art In Craft Media, IPCNY: New Prints 2017/Winter, Wheaton Biennial: Printmaking Reimagined, Currency: 11th Turner National Print Competition & Exhibition, and Screenprint Biennial 2016.
Mizin Shin is a co-founder of Mirabo Press in Buffalo, NY, vice president of the Print Club of Rochester, and a board member of Mid America Print Council. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Rochester.
Katy Sloan
Katy Sloan (she/her) is a mixed media artist and Educator based in Buffalo, NY. Sloan graduated from the State University of New York at New Paltz in the Summer of 2019 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking with honors and a Bachelor of Science in Art Education with honors. She completed her senior thesis exhibition, Afterimage, in the spring of 2018. In 2019, Sloan worked with the Book Arts Center as a resident artist to exhibit Summer, West Side in their studio gallery space. In her spare time, She works with the Latin American Cultural Association (LACA) as secretary of a steering committee to organize a mural for the south side of El Buen Amigo. She is currently working toward a Masters of Science in art education at Buffalo State College. Sloan leads workshops through the Book Arts Center as a Teaching Artist, and is an elementary and middle school art teacher in the Tonawanda City School District.
Peter Sowiski
Peter Sowiski received a BA in 1971 in Studio Art from Oberlin College, and an MFA in 1974 in Printmaking from Ohio State University. He first exhibited in 1971 and has since shown in over one hundred and eighty-five various regional, national and international group and solo exhibitions. Over the last thirty-six years he has held numerous workshops, lecture or visiting artist posts regionally, nationally and overseas. He taught at Buffalo State College from 1974- 2007. He has become primarily known as a pulp painter, with work in numerous public and private collections in America.
Kate Stapleton Parzych
Kate Stapleton Parzych is a visual artist and arts educator working in digital and darkroom photography, using many of her images for singular artist books. She was an adjunct professor for nearly 15 years after receiving her MFA from University at Buffalo, but has now shifted her focus by leading intuitive meditation sessions at yoga studios and various shops. Kate also leads a variety of Bookmaking workshops at Book Arts.
SuDi Wang
SuDi Wang (she/her) was born in Kunming, China and now lives in Buffalo NY, as a part-time printmaking artist. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Biology and Visual Art at SUNY Fredonia in 2021. SuDi’s artworks focus on monster creations that were influenced by different cultures that she grew up with and around. Her work also includes suminagashi, book art, and zine publications.
Janna Willoughby-Lohr
She is the host of Reach the Stars Podcast–which features inspiring stories of persistence, passion and purpose. Janna leads the membership committee for NAWBO’s Buffalo/Niagara Chapter and is a founding member of their Diversity & Inclusion Task Force. She has also served two terms on their board of directors.
She teaches all sorts of workshops including papermaking, bookbinding, paper flower making, and more.
Janna is a mom to three little kiddos and likes bright colors, giggling and things that are small.
BECOME A TEACHING ARTIST
Do you want become a Teaching Artist at the Western New York Book Arts Center? We’re always looking for skilled book artists, including but not limited to: origami artists, bookbinders, printmakers, papermakers, and calligraphers. We also welcome artists of other disciplines to add innovative class offerings to our list.