Brianna McIntyre was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and completed her B.F.A at the School of the Art Institute Chicago in 2017. Her focuses are Fibers and Material Studies and Design Objects with a concentration on furniture. She is interested in investigating social, and political identities through the use of fabrics, furniture, found objects, and clothing as her materials for construction, and as a form of communication.
Kayla Ginsburg is an artist, illustrator, and all around Jill-of-all trades. She received her BA in History and Film Studies from Smith College in 2013 and has been working in the Chicago art scenes ever since. In her work, Kayla creates unapologetically queer worlds that house the gray areas, the unsaid, the wrongly-said, and the silent in-betweens. She co-created Afternoon Snatch (a queer web comedy about heartbreak and the importance of community) and co-founded The Radical Stitchery (an online shop where everything is handmade, queer made, and mostly functional). She can’t seem to stop making things and she dreams of being able to make anything she needs.
Lia Rousset delights in opportunities where she can offer a myriad of making and collaborating skills to people who want to transition from acting solely as consumers to engaging as co-creators of their experiences and environments. She has a body for making, a mind for asking questions and a heart for connection. Lia currently lives on the coast of Oregon where she has a clinical bodywork practice, manages a farmers market and spends a good deal of her recreation time foraging in the woods and training her dogs to find truffles.
Sara Black is an artist who uses conscious processes of carpentry, wood-working, and repair as a time-based method; inherited building materials or other exhausted objects as material; and creates works that exposes the complex ways in which things and people are suspended in worlds together. She was a founder of the artist group Material Exchange that was active in Chicago until 2010 where she worked closely with artists John Preus and David Wolf, and has since been engaged in a number of collaborative works with artists Jillian Soto, Raewyn Martyn, Amber Ginsburg, Lia Rousset and others. Sara is currently in the role of Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Amber Ginsburg is an artist who creates site-generated projects and social sculpture that insert historical scenarios into present day situations. Her background in craft orients her projects towards the continuities and ruptures in material, social and utopic histories. Engaging objects as collaborators and narrative instigators, her work positions the audience as participants. Amber received her MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and is a Lecturer at the University of Chicago, Department of Visual Arts. Her research-based multimedia installations have been shown in museums and galleries across the United states as well as in Korea, Germany and England.
Miriam Stevens is a maker, rooted in Chicago, who has spent the last several years alternately immersed in the wood and metalworking & environmental fields. Miriam has taught woodworking to people of various ages in teaching artist programs and has led students and volunteers in general construction tasks as part of sustainable materials management projects in the city. Miriam received a B.A. in Visual Arts and Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago and now works as an Assistant Manager at an instructional wood and metal shop at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Caroline Robe is a Chicago-based trans woodworker, artist, and community carpenter. Caroline is deeply invested in their neighborhood on the Southwest Side, practicing regeneration through repair, narrative through spacemaking, and empowerment through building. Caroline has spent time in many places around the world observing vernacular architecture processes and natural design-build processes. They have a BFA from the University of Maine and are self taught in woodworking and fabrication.
Billy Dee is a gender-variant carpenter and teaching artist currently based in North Carolina where ze works as a construction crew leader for Habitat for Humanity of Durham. Billy received hir BFA from Concordia University in 2005 and has worked as theatre technician specializing in puppet design/building. Billy worked as a Youth Worker and temporarily as the Assistant Coordinator for “The Crib” (a Chicago based emergency overnight shelter for youth experiencing homelessness) from 2011-2014. Ze has created numerous illustrations for popular education materials produced by Chicago-based Project NIA, and has worked as an exhibit designer with Project NIA to create exhibits including “Black Inside:A History of Captivity and Confinement” at the African American Cultural Center at U.I.C. (2012).