“This panel will focus on the emerging and long-standing contributions of Black women in ceramics. “I believe that black women and black non-binary artists are a diverse, powerful, under-heard, under-seen, and under-represented part of the field of ceramics. Past as relating to historical objects, stories, and histories. Present as in where we are in 21st century America, the struggles we face, and how we deal with our current narrative, trauma, or understanding. Future as in relationship to healing, new worlds, and ideas, potential, utopia, destruction, building anew, etc.” - Adero Willard

Adero Willard is currently an assistant visiting professor at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. She earned a BFA at Alfred University in 1995 and an MFA at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2006. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally and has been featured in several publications and books on ceramics. She is one of the cofounders of Pots on Wheels, a nonprofit mobile clay education outreach project.

Isissa Komada-John is a mixed, Afro-Caribbean artist and designer, raised in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. Working primarily in clay and on paper, her work explores hybridity and the in-between. Her functional and sculptural ritual vessels serve to encourage contemplative practice and support personal and collective liberation. Isissa is a recipient of fellowships from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (Multicultural Fellowship), Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (Wingate University Fellowship), and The Color Network. She has been awarded grants and scholarships from Artists’ Literacies Institute and the Penland School of Craft. She was a 2022 resident at Township 10, and is an incoming 2023 artist-in-residence at POT LA. In the past, Isissa served as the Exhibitions Manager and Designer for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, and as the Exhibitions Director of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn. She holds an A.B. in Africana Studies from Brown University. Isissa enjoys practices that support presence and healing, and has been a student of the Buddhadharma for over ten years. She currently makes home at Moon Mountain, a budding land collective on unceded Cherokee land in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

Chelsea McMaster (b.1995) is a Ceramic Artist of Afro-Caribbean descent. She completed her BA at Millersville University (PA) in 2019. In 2023 she was awarded the NCECA Graduate Student Fellowship. She has now completed her first year of graduate study at Alfred University (NY). Chelsea makes work primarily using coil building and sculpting techniques with low-fire clay and traditional finishes. Her work seeks to find ways to represent her oral culture and traditions.

Sana Musasama earned her BA from City College of New York in 1973, and her MFA from Alfred University, New York, in 1988. Musasama received the 2018 Achievement Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts for her years of teaching and her humanitarian work with victims of sex trafficking in Cambodia. Musasama is the coordinator of the Apron Project, a sustainable entrepreneurial project for girls and young women reintegrated back into society after being forced into sex trafficking. In 2016, she was a guest speaker on “Activism through Art” at ROCA. A recently published article by Cliff Hocker, “If I can Help Somebody: Sana Musasama’s Art of Healing,” appears in the International Review of African American Art. In 2015, the Museum of Art and Design in New York selected four works from The Unspeakable Series for their private collection; Musasama was awarded the ACLU of Michigan Art Prize 7 and Art Prize 8. In 2002, she was awarded Anonymous Was a Women and in 2001, Musasama was featured in the 2001 Florence Biennial. Her work is in multiple collections such as The Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina; The Museum of Art and Design in New York, New York; the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, New York; the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York; Bluffton University in Bluffton, Ohio; and in numerous private collections. Musasama lives and works in New York.