Vanessa (she/her) grew up in rural Maine but has called Boston home for the last 10+ years. She graduated with a BFA in Ceramics from MassArt in 2016 and moved across the country to work for potters in Park City, UT and Seattle, WA before settling back in Boston where her love for clay began. She makes colorful cloud & rainbow pottery, marrying pastel colors with voluminous wheel-thrown forms that look like they might’ve dropped from a cartoon sky. When she's not hunched over in her studio decorating a mug, you can usually find her cuddling her cats or biking along the Charles River on her lavender cruiser. She’s a lover of handmade objects, tattoos, the color purple, cats, and all things clay.
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Kristin Powers | Instructor

Kristin (she/her) is a sculptural installation artist focused on creating spaces while leaving room for reflection. Working with multiple mediums, lens-based media, and sound, Powers explores an ever-evolving iterative landscape, looking for resonant frequencies where many feel.

Powers holds a BFA in Ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Sculpture from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has attended residencies at MERZ – Scotland, Vermont Studio Center, Haystack, and Penland. Powers’ recent curatorial projects include The Art of Lobbying, Raising the Gavel, Elemental, What Do We Have To Say?, and The Art of Storytelling. Her work has recently been shown at MassArt x SoWa in Boston, First Street Gallery in NYC, The Black Box Gallery in Oregon, and SAGE Gallery in Wyoming.
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Amy is a ceramicist, interdisciplinary artist and educator. She has been practicing ceramics for over ten years and specializes in hand-building sculptural forms. In her practice, she integrates several disciplines spanning ceramics, wood-working, paper mache, and fiber arts to construct large-scale sculptures and installations. She sees clay as a very valuable opponent and teacher, as it constantly demands our flexibility, investigation, and inventiveness. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Masters of Fine Arts in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Additionally, Amy has worked as a visual arts instructor for several K-12 public schools and possesses a deep love for helping students express themselves through the arts.

Sammy Sass | Instructor

Sammy fell in love with clay 25 years ago and has been making pottery ever since. She’s taught ceramics to adults, teens, and kids, and enjoys supporting people to learn the material and build confidence in clay. She believes in using our hands to connect with the restorative power of creativity. 

Emma Green | Instructor

Emma is an arts educator and multi-disciplinary maker who has been working in ceramics studios since 2015. She earned her BA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2019. Her practice spans ceramics, installation, printmaking, writing, and archival research to explore history, memory, and storytelling. She gained many of her ceramics skills as a studio manager at Yale's Trumbull Pottery Studio, and previously taught ceramics at the Community Folk Art Center in Syracuse, NY and Brookline Arts Center in Brookline, MA. As an educator she has also spent time teaching incarcerated youth and running visual arts programming for teens in the Greater Boston Area.

Warwick Laing | Instructor

Warwick (they/them) is a mixed media artist and educator who earned their BFA in Ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2023. While their interest in the arts is wide-ranging, their work is primarily based in clay, specifically wheel-thrown objects that find their place in homes or sculptural installations. As an educator, Warwick strives to help their students make connections between their day-to-day lives and their creative expression, both inside and outside of the classroom.
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Moon Rodríquez Diestler | Instructor

Moon’s (he/him) ceramic sculptures, installations, and performance work lace together ritual, repetition, and practice in order to raise questions about identity, and existence. Rodríguez constantly challenges the sanctity of historically elitist materials such as porcelain, oil paints, and gold leaf. These materials are used carefully yet unconventionally, and reborn within the installations created. Moon received his BFA with a concentration in ceramics from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and received his MFA from the University of Delaware in December 2019. Currently, Rodríguez is making art in his apartment that he shares with his partner and two cats in Brighton, MA. He works the studio manager at the Brookline Arts Center in addition to his work at JP Clay.

Felissa King | Instructor

Felissa (she/her/hers) received a BFA in sculpture from Taylor University. Post college, she expanded her ceramic practice at community studios through membership prior to co-founding Yellow Door Ceramics Studio, a community studio in Indianapolis, Indiana. Alongside teaching and studio ownership, Felissa is a working artist whose work explores the beauty and patterns of a vibrant garden through detailed painted and slip-trailed underglaze decoration on functional stoneware pieces. 

Felissa is the 2025-2026 Artist in Residence at Mudflat Studios, in Somerville, MA!  In her free time, you can find her tinkering on DIY projects, biking around Boston, or learning how to grow a thriving container garden.