About Our Instructors

Lorrie Grainger Abdo has taught papermaking, printmaking, and bookbinding classes for students of all ages in Michigan and beyond. She was trained in papermaking at Sievers School of Fiber Arts and by the KBAC cofounder, Paul Robbert. She is the former Administrative Director of the KBAC and currently serves on the Board of Directors. @lorriegraingerabdo lorrieabdo.blogspot.com 

Carolyn Ingram is a multi-media artist who explores the combination and exploration of drawing, printing, and painting. Carolyn holds a degree in studio art, film, and media from Kalamazoo College. @ckingramprints ckingram.com

Jeff Kass teaches tenth-grade English and Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s the award-winning author of Knuckleheads, Independent Publishers Best Short Fiction Collection of 2011, as well as two full-length poetry collections, My Beautiful Hook-nosed Beauty Queen Strut Wave and Teacher/Pizza Guy, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book. He is currently a featured poetry instructor with the Michigan Learning Channel, has taught poetry classes and workshops to thousands of students, and is a recipient of a prestigious 2023 Jack Hazard Fellowship for writers who teach in public schools. His newest poetry collection, True Believer, consists of poems that spin around and through Marvel Comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. FB: Jeff Kass

Julie Kechele has had a lifelong interest in calligraphy as an art form, as well as a technical skill. Initially self-taught, she has studied with nationally and internationally known calligraphers; has served on the board of Pen Dragons Calligraphy Guild for many years, and taught calligraphy at KVCC from 2016 through 2020. In addition to exhibiting her work and accepting a variety of lettering commissions, she is now committed to passing along her enthusiasm for, and skill at, what is increasingly thought of as a 'lost' art.

JoAnne Laudolff is a Saugatuck-based artist and art instructor who has been teaching Japanese papermaking, printmaking, oil and cold wax, and mixed media workshops for 25 years. She holds a BA from Columbia College in Chicago and an MA in Studio Arts from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. @joannelaudolffart JoAnnesPaperBarn.com

Tony(a) Lemos. As a lifelong environmentalist and plant person, Tony(a)’s work as an artist and healer sits at the intersection of Art, Ecology, and Herbalism. She has taught classes and workshops across the country, including at the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, The New England Botanical Garden, The Provincetown Art Museum, Books in the Woods, and Shepherd and Maudsley Printmaking. She has shown her books in several local solo and group gallery shows, and has curated shows locally. @tonyalemosarts   BSKY: tonyalemosarts tonyalemosarts.com

Kelly Leitermann is an experienced papermaker and printmaker with a passion for education. Though her work primarily lies in drawing-based intaglio, she has also worked professionally at high-production papermaking companies, master print shops, small community art centers, and multiple Universities. New to Michigan, Kelly is currently teaching at Southwestern Michigan College and is enjoying getting to know the local art communities. @catclawpress kellyleitermann.com 

Ray Maseman is an art teacher, printmaker, and collage artist living in Stevensville, MI. His etchings and collages have been exhibited internationally and are in numerous public and private collections. He has been featured in an episode of PBS’s ¡Colores! and Faroe Islands Podcast interviewed him after his residency in the Faroe Islands. He is also the co-author of New Grounds: The Manual for Non-Toxic Etching. FB & IG: raymaseman raymaseman.com

Mable Buchanan Palmer is an affiliate professor in the English and Creative Writing programs at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids. With a background that also includes improv, puppetry, and music, she has previously taught and directed theater productions in public schools in Maryland and supported organizations like Poetry Out Loud.

Katie Platte is a graduate of the Studio Art program at Grand Valley State University. She completed an internship at the Women’s Studio Workshop, an arts organization specializing in printmaking and book arts in Rosendale, New York. Katie manages the KBAC studio, supervises interns and volunteers, manages the website, and installs exhibitions in the KBAC Gallery. She has supervised the printing of over 100 KBAC Poets in Print broadsides, working with writers and artists to facilitate the collaborations.

Rachel Stickney is a Michigan-based visual artist and book maker. After obtaining her BFA in painting from Western Michigan University, Rachel travelled to the Florence School of Fine Arts to obtain her Post-Baccalaureate Certificate with an emphasis in painting and book arts. She has taught art classes and given demonstrations at several local businesses and institutions. She loves lively, hands-on classes, sharing techniques and stories, and is a lifelong learner of all things art. Her work and handmade books can be found here www.rachelstickney.com and parallaxbookpress.com. 

Ann Marie Thornburg earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and she is now a PhD student in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her poetry is published in Boston Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Rosemary Rae is a creative director/designer, artist, and design educator living in San Diego, CA. A graduate of Moore College of Art & Design and Vermont College of Fine Arts, she currently works in publishing, creating book covers, calendars, and kits that are sold nationwide. In addition to designing her unique line of letterpressed greeting cards, she also creates collages and artist books, which have been featured in many juried exhibitions. rosemaryraedesign.com @rosemarydesign

Syd Webb is a second-generation printer from the Midwest living in Texas. Since earning her MFA, she has worked as an adjunct professor and taught many studio workshops. Syd has a love for all things print and paper and finds joy in teaching. @4acrepress 4acrepress.com

Past Visiting Instructors

Caroline Allen taught as a Lecturer in Literature and Writing at the College of Creative Studies (CCS) at UC Santa Barbara for over three decades, while also pursuing her work as a visual artist. Her writing has appeared in publications including The Santa Barbara Independent, Juxtapose Literary Magazine, Solo Novo, and Mary, and she has work in the collections of
Santa Barbara and Ventura County. For several years Allen co-directed the CCS Summer Arts Institute, bringing under-represented preteen and teenage students to the UCSB campus for painting, drawing, writing, and photography lessons in a six-week intensive program. As an artist she works in a variety of media including painting, printmaking, ceramics, and collage. Her most recent project was a collaboration with the writer Kay Young on an illustrated book entitled We’ve Never Been So Unannoyed: Iceland for the Lady Traveler. Allen has created images for the KBAC letterpress publication The Ghosts, a limited-edtion book of short stories by Kia Penso.

Jean Buescher Bartlett teaches Book Arts and The History of Design at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. She maintains a studio and bindery in Ann Arbor's Old West Side. Jean received her MFA in Book Arts from the University of Alabama in 1989. She has been making limited edition, letterpress printed, illustrated books under her imprint, Bloodroot Press, producing one-of-a-kind artists' books, and teaching Book Arts workshops across the country for the last thirty years. A full catalog of her work and activities can be found at her website: www.bloodrootpress.com

Ben Blount is a Detroit born artist, designer and letterpress printer best known for posters and books that explore ideas of race and identity and the stories we tell ourselves about living in America. Ben is a believer in the power of the printed word and shares his passion for design and print with curious students and educators around the country. His work is included in numerous collections including the Chicago Field Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Béatrice Coron shares her passion for the different forms of papercutting in workshops designed to inspire creativity and experimentation. Self-taught, she can speak about her personal experience about public art, murals, artist books and animations. She has been teaching workshops since 1999 in art centers and museums around the world.

Deb Eck works with paper, thread and text on every scale from installation to artist books that fit in your hands. Her love of threads was fostered in childhood and has fueled her obsession with traditional needle arts. She discovered book binding during her studies at The University of Buffalo whilst earning her BFA and has been tinkering with book arts in many forms ever since. She is best known in the book arts community for her reimagining of traditional embroidery patterns as functional binding structures, and is currently diagraming her patterns to share with other binders.

Yoshisuke Funasaka is a Tokyo-based woodblock and silkscreen printmaker best known for his colorful, repeated depictions on various themes. He has taught the traditional methods of Japanese woodblock printmaking at Asahi Culture Center in Tokyo since the 1970’s. Over the years, he has had several foreign students (including Kalamazoo artist, Mary Brodbeck) that sought out his expertise in the Japanese woodblock methods, as well as his knowledge on baren-making – the handheld burnishing tool special to the woodblock process. In addition to teaching baren-making in the Tokyo area, he has taught this at universities in Thailand and Taiwan. Funasaka’s  prints are in numerous museums worldwide.  His work can be found here.

Jim Horton has taught all levels of art classes. He currently teaches workshops, such as at the John Campbell Folk School. He monitors a letterpress studio at the Duderstadt Library at the UM. He is part of an international organization of wood engravers called Wood Engravers' Network. He maintains a historic display at the Hamilton Wood type Museum, and volunteers at Greenfield Village.

Amos P. Kennedy, Jr. (Visiting Artist) is a printer, book artist, and papermaker, who is best known for creating brilliantly-colored letterpress prints that express social and political commentary. Using hand presses, he produces large editions of typographically-driven posters on inexpensive chipboard stock, often layered with many vibrant colors of ink. His bold and challenging prints have been collected by libraries, and he has taught workshops throughout the US, South America, and Europe. In 2009, the feature-length documentary film Proceed and Be Bold, focused on his life and work. In 2015, he was honored as a United States Artists Glasgow Fellow in Crafts.

Aimee Lee (Visiting Artist) is an artist who makes paper, writes, and advocates for Korean papermaking practices as an Ohio Arts Council Heritage Fellow (BA, Oberlin College; MFA, Columbia College Chicago). Her initial Fulbright research led to the first hanji studio in North America, an award-winning book, Hanji Unfurled, and an active studio practice that includes jiseung, joomchi, paper textile, botanical paper, book art, and natural dyeing techniques. She travels the world to teach, exhibit, and serve as a resident artist while also building and enhancing studios for Korean and East Asian papermaking. Her recent Fulbright Senior Scholar research focused on bamboo screens for hanji making in Korea. https://aimeelee.net

Susana McDonnell is the owner of LinoCave, a Boston-based home studio focused on geometric pattern design and block printing on fabric and paper. She holds a BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and is a lifelong artist who has studied and taught many mediums including, but not limited to glassblowing, neon, wood, drawing and watercolor. Despite the fact that block printing is one of the few mediums she has not formally studied, the allure of it inspires her to teach and explore it further every day. She is the co-host of #printersolstice, a prompt-based printmaking campaign that inspires printmakers around the world to create during the winter solstice and is also a Speedball Demo Artist. 

Sarah Matthews is a MA Art & the Book graduate from the Corcoran College of Arts and Design at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.  Mrs. Matthews also received an MBA with a Marketing Concentration in 2005 and a BS in Sociology in 2000 from Bowie State University in Bowie, MD. Mrs. Matthews’ work has been exhibited in the US and is a part of the permanent collections of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, George Washington University’s Gelman Library, University of Puget Sound, and Samford University. Mrs. Matthews is a full-time artist and currently teaches bookbinding and printmaking at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center and Minnesota Book Arts Center.

Amy Pirkle teaches design, book arts, and interdisciplinary studies at The University of Alabama, where she is an Assistant Professor. Her fine press work resides in over 60 permanent collections across the U.S., and as a flipbook artist, she has received commissions from McDonalds, Crayola, the BBC, Amazon Prime, Callaway Golf, Fairlife Milk, and Best Western (among others). 

Erica Spitzer Rasmussen is an artist and educator who specializes in sculptural book forms. She creates one-of-a-kind and limited-edition hand-bound books, which most often explore family stories and issues of identity. IG: @erica_spitzer_rasmussen

Shawn Sheehy has been teaching book arts courses and workshops for 20 years, including stops at MCBA, Center for Book Arts, Penland, Arrowmont, FOBA, Pyramid Atlantic, San Francisco Center for the Book, and PBI. His two trade pop-up books—Welcome to the Neighborhood (2015) and Beyond the Sixth Extinction (2018)—were published by Candlewick Press and won numerous awards.

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include Her Read A Graphic Poem (2021) and A Wake with Nine Shades (2019), both from Texas Review Press. A poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist, and licensed builder, she has received grants from Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Community of Writers, and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College; her visual poetry has recently appeared in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Plume, Rhino, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.

Erin McCluskey Wheeler is a painter, collagist, writer, curator, and teacher based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Erin has a BA in studio art and art history from Beloit College, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Erin is a faculty member of the 92nd Y School of the Arts in New York City and teaches collage and mixed media classes throughout the Bay Area.

Shannon K. Winston is a poet and teacher based in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author of The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press, 2021); her individual poems have appeared in Rhino, Los Angeles Review, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Find more about her here: https://shannonkwinston.com.Past Visiting instructors