About
Catskill Weaving School is artist-run school offering in-person and online weaving and textile classes with a focus on creative skill building and experiential learning.
Samantha Bittman, Founder / Instructor
Samantha Bittman is a visual artist and educator based in Kingston, NY. In her art practice, she works with weaving to generate patterned painting supports, graphic wallpapers, and tiled installations. She has taught at various institutions including Rhode Island School of Design, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tyler School of Art, Penland, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Kent State University, and the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn. In 2022, she founded Catskill Weaving School, an artist-run school that offers in-person and online weaving and weaving-related classes. She has participated in residency programs at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Ox-Bow School of Art. In 2024, she received the Teaching Artist Cohort Award through the Center for Craft, and in 2012, she received the Artadia Award. She holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design.
Margot Becker, Instructor
Margot Becker is an artist, weaver, and educator based in Hudson, NY. Her work explores sense of place, the natural environment, and the connection between the individual and the communal subconscious. Through tactile processes, she questions our understanding of sustainability, the value of labor and the role of handcraft in late capitalism. Her weaving practice originated from a desire to understand the origins of cloth and the lives affected by it. In 2010, Margot embarked on a study to understand the process of creating textiles from start to finish. Following the belief that to know your production line, you must be your production line, this project became an all-encompassing life practice- incorporating animal husbandry, yarn spinning technologies and fine hand weaving. Her work has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. She received her BA in studio art from Bard College in 2009 and her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2020
Susan Chiappini, Instructor
Susan Chiappini is a self taught quilt artist and educator living in Rhinebeck, NY. Her designs explore the use of color and print in traditional American patterns as well as in improvisational patchwork. She sees quilts as an art form that enhance domestic spaces with warmth and the spirit of the hands that made them. Her work has been supported by residencies at the Penland School of Craft. Spending Summer as the farm kitchen supervisor at Montgomery Place Orchards in Red Hook NY, Susan enjoys the winter months in her home studio with sewing, teaching and studying quilt history. In addition to teaching quilt making skills, she holds cooking workshops that focus on nutrition education. A scientist at heart, she holds a PhD in human physiology from the Medical College of Virginia, and studied nutrition at Columbia University.
Dee Clements, Instructor
Dee Clements is a process-based artist with interests in materials, craft, and ethnography. She holds an MFA in 3D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Fiber and Materials Studies and Sculpture from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.
Lauren Colbert, Instructor
Lauren Colbert is an artist and designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is rooted in experimentation and explores the intersection of color, connection, and play through woven structures and sculptural forms. Lauren started her textile career working in costume design for film and television and has worked with notable clients such as Netflix, HBO, Hulu, NBC and Universal. In 2020, she founded an experimental textile studio, LALA stuff, that specializes in color and interior textiles. LALA stuff focuses on creating everyday items for your home with a sense of humor and is sold online domestically and internationally. Her works have been shown in exhibitions across the New York City area and featured in Elle Decor. Lauren holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design, where she graduated with Departmental Honors.
Zenona Darrow, Teaching Assistant
Zenona Darrow is a multidisciplinary weaver based in the Catskills, NY, where she grew up. With weaving at the center of her practice, she explores the rhythmic nature of the process, found in the movement of body, tools, and the sound of different parts of the loom moving, as a reflective space where the accumulation of weft grows into a catalog of thoughts that embeds itself into the weaving alongside image and pattern. Rhythm and repetition become contemplative, tender, and familiar; sometimes tedious which can be both positive and negative. This sense of rhythm has rooted itself, or is inherently rooted, in other mediums she works with as well, such as ceramics, painting, drawing, etc. Her work often touches on memory, the self, home, imagined landscapes, history, geography, geology, and intuition. Zenona has been a resident at the Icelandic Textile Center in Blönduós and holds a BFA in Textiles with a liberal arts concentration in History, Philosophy, and Social Sciences from Rhode Island School of Design, conferred with honors.
Claire Reynes, Instructor
Claire Reynes is an artist and educator living in South Portland, Maine. Her work involves handmade paper, water marbling, and sewing that draws from nature and the human body. Claire owns and operates Tempered East, a marbling studio that creates small-batch marbled papers, fabrics, and one-of-a-kind pieces for your home or your closet. Her work is a manifestation of the meditative experience of marbling and papermaking, pulling unexpected colors and textures together in a repetitive design that emulates moments in nature. The organic repetition of the shadows of leaves cast on the sidewalk, lichen patches covering the natural pattern of a rock, and the repeating layers of barnacles in a tide pool are all vignettes she draws on for inspiration. She teaches introductory marbling workshops on paper and fabric and has been hosted at studios and institutions across the country.
Isa Rodrigues, Instructor
Isa Rodrigues is a textile artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York, and Lagos, Portugal. She’s interested in the innovation potential of traditional techniques and materials, sustainable processes, and education as a means for community-building and preserving material culture. She’s a founding team member of the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, where she was Co-Executive Director and founded the project Sewing Seeds, creating and activating natural dye gardens in public spaces and community gardens. She continues her research of natural dyes as co-lead for the Pratt Institute’s Natural Dye Garden and as a creative consultant for The Mothership natural dye garden and residency in Tangier, Morocco. Isa also runs a textile fabrication business, 505 Textiles, through which she has created work for clients such as Altuzarra, Gabriela Hearst, Ace Hotel, M.Patmos, Thompson Street Studio, amongst others. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Art and Design and the Cooper Hewitt Museum. She teaches textile materiality, weaving, natural dyeing, and other surface design techniques at the Textile Arts Center, Rhode Island School of Design, Fashion Institute of Technology, Ox-Bow School of Art and Pratt Institute.
April Rose, Instructor
April Rose is a queer sewist, textile artist and slow fashion enthusiast based in the Hudson Valley. She taught herself to sew as a teenager and leveled up her skills at the Portland Fashion Institute in Portland, Oregon where she learned Apparel Construction in 2016. Her recycled clothing line, Secret Admirer, has been sold in independent boutiques around the country and has gained popularity for her creative approach to turning textile waste into one-of-a-kind garments. She is currently a member of the Red Owl Collective in Kingston, NY, where she vends her reworked pieces alongside a curated vintage collection.
Etta Sandry, Instructor
Etta Sandry is an artist, educator, and facilitator currently based in Boulder, Colorado. Rooted in weaving, her interdisciplinary work is situated in the expanded material practices field between craft, contemporary art, and creative research. In her studio work and research, she considers sample making as an experimental practice and a way of thinking through material. Etta has exhibited work in the United States and Canada and was the 2022 Experimental Weaver in Residence at the Unstable Design Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder where they now conduct research as a PhD student. They have taught weaving and fiber classes at Concordia University and the Denver Art Museum and have worked as an organizer and administrator in numerous arts communities, including roles as a board member at the artist-run centre articule in Montreal and as a volunteer staff in ACRE Residency’s fiber studio in Wisconsin. Etta received an MFA in the Fibre & Material Practices program at Concordia University.
Jen Simms, Instructor
Jen Simms is an interdisciplinary artist living in Western Massachusetts. Her studio practice, grounded in textile arts, painting and drawing explores ideas about balancing the complexity, beauty and chaos of everyday life. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA, 1997) and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (MFA, 2004). Simms’s work has been exhibited throughout New England, including the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, the Fitchburg Art Museum and the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center. She has been a recipient of various awards and grants, as well as a participant in the Open Studio Residency at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Jen Simms is a full-time professor and chair of the Greenfield Community College Art Department.
Natalie Stopka, Instructor
Natalie Stopka is an artist and educator focused on natural materials and sustainable studio practice. Her artwork incorporates botanical dyes and pigments, which provide a seasonally evolving vocabulary of texture and color. Natalie’s freelance studio and dye garden are located in Yonkers, New York. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from the University of New Mexico.
Ana Svoboda-Stel, Instructor
Anna Svoboda-Stel is a self-taught seamstress living in Catskill, New York. She has been doing mending repairs and alterations in the Hudson Valley since 2019, building on years of experience. When she’s not doing repairs, she loves quilting, weaving, and making things with her hands with a focus on sustainability, using second-hand materials.