MaPó Kinnord grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. She received her first training in ceramics through Cleveland’s Quaker-founded alternative high school, the School on Magnolia. She apprenticed with several production potters before receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1984. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Ohio State University in 1994. Arriving in New Orleans in 1995, she now serves as an Associate Professor of Art at Xavier University. A well-respected educator, Kinnord has taught workshops at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine and the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, as well as the Kambe no Sato Arts Center in Matsue, Japan. She has researched the traditional and contemporary art of Ghana and has produced video documentation of the traditional pottery, kiln building and ceramic architecture of Northern Ghana, West Africa.

Alisha N. Porter is an emerging ceramic artist born and raised in the American Southwest and have achieved a bachelor’s degree of Individualized Studies from New Mexico State University, focused in Gender and Sexuality, Sociology, Elementary Education, and Applied Art–Ceramics. They are proud of their time spent at the New Harmony Clay Project in the Fall and Winter of 2020 as an Artist-In-Residence and are currently engaged as a first-year Master of Fine Arts Candidate at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville. They have exhibited work in group exhibitions in Portland, Oregon, at Verum Ultimum Gallery; Loveland, Colorado at The Artworks of Loveland Contemporary Art Gallery; and New Harmony, Indiana at The New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art. They are a BIPOC, gender non-binary, first-generation earner of a college degree engaging their feminism as homework and grassroots work and are notably generous with their experience, strength, and hope.

Identical twin brothers Kelly and Kyle Phelps are Professors at private Catholic universities in Ohio. Kelly Phelps is a Professor at Xavier University (Cincinnati) where he oversees the ceramic and sculpture departments. Kyle is a Professor at University Dayton (Dayton) where he is the head of the ceramic and sculpture departments. Much of the twins’ ceramic-based work is about the blue collar working-class, race relations, and the everyday struggles of the common man and woman. Both Kelly and Kyle continue to work collaboratively to create their artwork and share a studio in Centerville, Ohio. The twins share numerous grants, regional, national, and international exhibitions, and commissions. Their work is also included in many permanent museum collections across the US. Most notably, private collectors of the twins’ work are film director Michael Moore and actor Morgan Freeman. As well, their work is the focus of major reviews in the world-acclaimed Ceramics Monthly, Sculpture Magazine, and American Craft Magazine.

For a number of years, the twins have produced work that incorporates the handcrafted forms (ceramic based) that are juxtaposed with found/site-specific objects. The twins combine gears, corrugated metal, and scrap-machined parts, along with modeled ceramic figures to create a visual narrative composition about the blue-collar experience. The twins source, archive, and repurpose any found object to be used in their narratives, from abandoned industrial sites such as factories, steel/textile mills, warehouses, coal mines, and railroad yards.

Deshun Peoples is a ceramic artist and designer from Chicago who explores empathy and agency through wheel-thrown, hand-built, and slip-cast ceramic objects. He earned his dual BA in Studio Art and Rhetoric from Bates College and his MFA in Ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).