Current Treats Studios Tenants & Founders

  • Rickie Barnett grew up in the Northern California city of Redding. He attended California State University, Chico, receiving a Bachelors of Fine Art degree with an emphasis in painting and ceramics. After Graduating in the fall of 2013 he took up a year long position as an Artist in Residence at Taos Clay Studio in Taos, NM. He then moved to Seattle for a long term position as a Studio assistant to Deborah Schwartzkopf at Rat City Studios. During this time he also worked for sculptor George Rodriguez. In 2016, he moved to North Carolina, to become a studio assistant to ceramic sculptors, Cristina Cordova and Jeannine Marchand. His work has been shown both internationally and nationally. He has taught and done numerous short term residencies all over the country. Currently, he lives near Penland School of Craft, where he shares a home and studio with his partner, Lynne Hobaica, in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. Visit Rickie’s website.

  • Shae Bishop is an artist who examines the relationships between ceramics and textiles by making wearable garment sculptures. Originally from Kentucky, he studied ceramics and art history at the Kansas City Art Institute. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and done residencies at The Archie Bray Foundation in Montana, Red Star Studios in Kansas City, San Diego State University, and elsewhere in the US, as well as in Hungary, Turkey, and Indonesia. When not in the studio he can be found in the river looking for salamanders. Visit Shae’s website.

  • Stormie Burns is a former Penland Core Fellow, artist, mold maker, and flower farmer. Her artwork centers on ceramics, though she has also explored techniques in pâte de verre and solid glass. Stormie operates Isla Transfers, a small business that produces hand-printed underglaze transfers for ceramic artists. In addition to her studio practice, Stormie is a dedicated flower farmer specializing in dahlias and heirloom blooms. Her locally grown cut flowers are available at several locations in the area, reflecting the same care and attention to detail found in her sculptural work. More info about Stormie's flowers (Snow Creek Flora) can be found here, more info about Isla Transfers can be found here, and more info about Stormie’s vessel work can be found here.

  • Erin E. Castellan is an artist who crafts physical images using thread, beads, paint, and found fabrics. In this digital world of slick screens and quick images, she is interested in promoting slow viewing experiences and intimate, tactile engagements. Erin received a BFA in Textile Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA in Painting from Indiana University, but it is her time spent living and working at craft schools that she values most. Erin recently moved to the Spruce Pine area and is the Gallery Coordinator at Penland School of Craft. When not busy in the studio, she enjoys digging in the dirt, growing food, hiking, and watching the changing light outdoors. Visit Erin’s website.

  • David was born in El Paso, Texas and spent much of his life in Austin, Texas.  Initially he began his undergraduate career attending Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, pursuing a degree program for Biology Art.  He attended the program for two years before returning to Austin to complete his BFA at the University of Texas in Austin, with a primary emphasis in painting. He earned his MFA in Metalsmithing in 2007 from San Diego State University. David taught in the art department at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, Arkansas for 10 years. During 8 of those years he was responsible for creating and heading the Metalsmithing and Jewelry Department. In 2018 he relocated to Penland, North Carolina to dedicate his time to be an independent artist and workshop instructor.  Much of his work embraces the craft of Metalsmithing and it’s collected history of techniques and objects. The resulting works rendered in metal, mixed media, and hand made artist books are vehicles to communicate ideas surrounding identity, narrative, and forays into material and process-based work.  He has exhibited in numerous exhibitions including: Craft in America: Expanding Traditions, Different Tempers: Jewelry & Blacksmithing, RE/ACTIONS, and has work in the permanent collection of the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, National Ornamental Metal Museum. Yale Contemporary Craft Museum, Ollie Trout Collection at the University of Texas in Austin. Visit David’s website.

  • Andrea Connolly is a fiber artist and specialty tea business owner. Her work largely focuses on repurposing found and up-cycled materials, pushing back against a culture of over-consumption to craft beauty out of materials that would otherwise be cast away. With over a decade of experience working in public libraries, Andrea is interested in exploring how the core tenets of lifelong learning and equal access may be incorporated into a visual and tactile aesthetic. Visit Andrea’s website.

  • Claire is a fiber artist whose work imbues cast-off materials with possibility, value, and joy. Some of her favorite processes are machine knitting, quilting, and clothing construction. Mostly self-taught, Claire has a certificate in fashion design from the Massachusetts College of Art and design. She first began making art in 2017, inspired by the vibrant and inclusive arts community in Houston, Texas. Growing up in the foothills of East Tennessee (Maryville), Claire returned to Appalachia in July of 2021 by way of Houston, where she lived since 2014. In Texas, her work has been featured at Box 13 ArtSpace, Amarillo Art Museum, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, etc. Claire enjoys sharing her practice with her community. She was the Featured Artist for the Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Centers “Making a Mark” program in 2019 and her work has been supported by the Houston Arts Alliance. Visit Claire’s website.

  • Katie Elkins, a Birmingham, AL native, is a multifaceted artist who graduated from Guilford College with a BFA in Ceramics. Her artistic journey spans teaching art to all ages, participating as a resident artist, and engaging in collaborations with performance artists, theatre groups, individual musicians, and the Alabama Symphony. A former regional storyteller for the Birmingham Public Library system, Katie's work has been featured in both private and public collections, including the Smithsonian, Bare Hands Gallery and Naked Art Gallery. While her primary medium is clay, she also creates mixed media and textile art, with personal mythology as a macrocosm being a central theme throughout her creations. She is currently working on a graphic novel. Visit Katie’s website.

  • Annie is a furniture maker who splits her time between Bakersville, NC and Cookeville TN. Joy, laughter, and the unexpected are at the heart of her work. She has been a resident artist at the Penland School of Craft, the Windgate Resident at multiple Universities, and exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2019, Evelyn co-founded Crafting the Future, a collective of artists working together to provide equitable opportunities in the arts. She is currently assistant professor in the wood studio and head of the Craft and Material Studies Program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. Visit Annie’s website.

  • Morgan Hill is a sculptor and jewelry designer whose work draws on a wide range of aesthetic and conceptual influences from 90’s pop culture, cult films, and costume design to her Southern, Christian upbringing and experiences as the only female child in an extended family of farmers in Arkansas. Her longing to break the silence surrounding culturally censured topics drives her to create work on themes of death, abuse, depression, and suicide, as well as their counterparts of rebirth, healing, and empowerment. On the lighter side, her jewelry brand Bad Habits by Morgan Hill celebrates the pleasure of excess and indulged desires. Visit Morgan’s website.

  • Lynne Hobaica is a multi-media artist creating works mostly with ceramics, textiles, and tattooing. Her narrative work is inspired by both real and imagined histories. Born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, Lynne Hobaica received her BFA from Syracuse University and later completed her MFA in Conceptual Ceramic Sculpture at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria. Lynne has exhibited work in the US and abroad and participated in national and international residencies including the McKnight Residency at Northern Clay Center, Ceramica Perugia in Italy, Pottery Northwest, Watershed and more. She currently lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains where she shares a home and studio with her partner, Rickie Barnett and their sweet pup, Smokey. Visit Lynne’s website.

  • Lori Brook Johnson is an artist and educator. Born in the coal fields of West Virginia, Lori's work uses drawing materials to explore the impact of labor on relationships and one's ability to grieve. She is a 2018 and 2020 recipient of The Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and received her MFA from Clemson University where she lectured in art. She now lives in Bakersville, NC with her dog, Benicio. She is a Teaching Artist in the Schools at Penland School of Craft where she says "Kids art is my favorite!" daily and/or hourly. Visit Lori’s website.

  • Jamie Karolich is a printmaker, designer and educator with over 10 years of letterpress printing experience. Jamie's studio practice stems from observing and documenting patterns and forms in the built and natural worlds, and takes shape through drawing, painting and printmaking. Visit Jamie’s website.

  • Founded in 2021 by Cami Leisk and Brady Connelly, Loam provides marketing services for artists and arts organizations. Loam WNC is headed up by Cami Leisk who has over 10 years experience working in galleries, museums, and artists studios in various roles. She holds a BFA from Alfred University with a concentration in ceramics and glass. Most recently Cami worked for the Penland Gallery and the Jun Kaneko Studio.

    Loam offers a range of artist-focused services including photo + video services, website building, and marketing strategy/SEO consulting. For more information about Loam WNC, visit the website. More information about Brady and Loam NOLA coming soon.

    photo, Elin Oom

  • Kylie Reece Little (b. 1994) is an artist best known for sculpture and installation. She was raised in Goshen, Indiana and graduated from University of Indianapolis (2016) with a BS in Studio Art and Pre-Art Therapy. She recently received her MFA in Sculpture from the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University in Atlanta (2021). Kylie creates using a variety of materials but favors wood, metal and other naturally occurring elements, such as water and soil. Her work has been exhibited at Swan Coach House Gallery, Indianapolis Art Center, Temporary Art Center, Roswell Visual Arts Center, and the Kyoto International Community House. Kylie is currently living and making in Bakersville, NC while working as the Wood Studio Coordinator at Penland School of Crafts. Visit Kylie’s website.

  • Jack Mauch is a multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and educator. His work ranges from fine-furniture to small-batch production items, and much in between. Jack is especially interested in how digital tools can benefit the creative practices of artists and craftspeople. He explores this question in his own work and by consulting with artists and institutions seeking to bring digital processes into their repertoire. Jack holds a BFA in ceramics from the Maine College of Art and was a Core Fellow at the Penland School of Craft. Visit Jack’s website.

  • Sarah McDowell is an interdisciplinary artist focusing in mixed media work on paper and mixed media sculpture. Her practice invites what can be learned from mistakes, the odd and uncomfortable, intimacy, and finding compassion for the unknown and ignored truths within ourselves. Originally from Northern California, she has a BA in art from UCLA and studied in Florence, Italy. Sarah has lived all over the world, most recently spending 18 months in New Zealand, and also enjoys knitting, sewing, gardening, backpacking and spending time outside in the woods with her husband and two kids.

  • Rachel Meginnes is an artist and coach. As an artist, she works with found quilts, pulling them apart, experiencing their maker’s logic in conversation with her own. Originally from Vermont, Rachel received her undergraduate degree in Art from Earlham College and her MFA from the University of Washington. Rachel has been part of the Penland area artist community for the past decade and was a Penland resident artist from 2012-2015. As a trusted mentor attuned to the difficulties of being an artist and feeling that call, she has guided artists through growth and challenge, offering them insight, clarity, and the momentum they need to move forward. For this reason, she splits her time between making her work and coaching other artists and the institutions that support them. Visit Rachel’s website.

    Headshot photo credit: Mercedes Jelinek

  • Jeff is a software engineer, outdoor enthusiast, avid gardener, bedroom DJ, builder, cyclist, and serious dabbler. He has taught high school as a volunteer on a tropical island, toured the US on a vegetable-oil-powered bus as an advocate for alternative fuels and sustainability, and spent a season training horses and playing polocrosse in Australia. More recently, he has settled down in the North Carolina mountains and found inspiration in the people here who are filling their spirits making and sharing.

  • Carter Norris is an alternative process photographer, currently based in Spruce Pine, NC. Her work uses nostalgic and narrative imagery to explore personal and familial memory through an art historical viewpoint. Norris utilizes multiple shooting methods including lomography, pinhole, and 35 mm photography, as well as various darkroom and early photographic chemical processes for capturing reminiscences. Her style and subject matter are influenced by photographic pioneers like Julia Margaret Cameron and Anna Atkins. Norris’s use of textiles references her own roots in Appalachian culture. She seeks to express her own emotions and experiences while utilizing humor, folk culture, and utilitarian methods. She is currently experimenting with 8mm film as a means of storytelling. Visit Carter’s website.

  • Teresa Pietsch is a studio potter whose work connects both the functional and the decorative, seeking to make pots that people want to touch, hold, and use. Finding inspiration from nature, looking at flowers, plants, and trees, her pots reflect ideas that are centered on life, growth, and experience. Teresa’s work is all about color and subtle texture and the red earthenware as the lifeblood underneath. Her hope is that the work brings a smile and joy to the person using it. Visit Teresa’s website.

  • Ellie Richards is a sculptor and furniture designer whose work explores the role of objects—especially domestic and functional forms—play in shaping our connection to place, one another, and ourselves.

    Working at the intersection of sculpture, craft, and design, Richards engages both traditional woodworking and the language of the readymade to create eclectic assemblages, installations, and one-of-a-kind furniture pieces. Her work investigates how labor, leisure, and play inform cultural expression, and how sculptural objects can act as carriers of shared values and tacit knowledge.

    She believes that craft is not only a tool for making, but a medium for meaning—capable of fostering empathy through shared material experiences. By inviting interaction, contemplation, and delight, her work activates a deeper relationship between people and the environments they inhabit.

    Richards has exhibited at the Mint Museum, the Center for Craft, SOFA Chicago, and the Society of Contemporary Craft. She has held Windgate residencies at the Center for Art in Wood, San Diego State University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and recently completed a three-year residency at Penland School of Craft.

    She teaches woodworking and creative practice at craft schools and art centers across the country, and is currently a lecturer at California State University Long Beach. Richards lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, where she maintains her studio at LA Woodshop. Visit Ellie’s website.

  • Suzanne Joy Teune is an artist who paints portraits using plant-based dyes and inks she creates by foraging from the landscape. Her creative process is deeply rooted in her relationship with the Earth—she listens, asks permission, and invites the spirit of the land into her studio. Suzanne paints on fabric, often incorporating embroidery and hand stitching, merging her love of portraiture with a reverence for natural materials and textiles.

    For Suzanne, painting is both intuitive and spiritual—a way for energy and Spirit to move through her hands and heart. Her work is an offering of healing and love, created with the intention of being a gentle, grounding presence in the world. Through her art, Suzanne hopes to invite others to slow down, reconnect with the Earth, and listen to the quiet guidance of their own hearts. Visit Suzanne’s website

  • Em Trentham makes hand-built ceramics and hand-dipped beeswax candles out of their studio in Raleigh, NC. Their work is inspired by queer ecology, natural oddities, and the joy of slow, tactile processes. Em’s functional pieces—mugs, vases, coasters, plates, and candlesticks—draw from quilt patterns, playful forms in nature, and the meditative act of pinching clay. They also create sculptural ceramics that feature slugs, mushrooms, sea creatures, and insects. Slugs, in particular, are Em’s muse—beautifully queer and often misunderstood, they’ve captivated Em since their first handbuilding class and continue to evolve in form through their hands. View Em’s website.

  • Sadie is a dog who thinks Treats Studios should live up to its name. She is deeply passionate about greeting visitors and sneezing in their faces.

Past Treats Studios Tenants & Residents

  • Zoe Alexa is a multimedia artist based in South Florida. She received her BFA in Sculpture from the California College of the Arts in 2013, and is a maker of playfully-odd sculptures. Zoe informs her practice through previous work in prosthetic movie makeup, fabrication and upholstery. She recently completed a residency at Treats Studios in North Carolina making soft wall sculptures titled Notions. 

  • Garrett is a writer of poetry and short fiction, with some experience in mixed media formats that incorporate videos and photos to create a deeper connection between audience and author. Typically utilizing a singular voice or fixed perspective, he desires to share intense and personal narratives. Pulling from his family history growing up in Louisiana, his writing can be nostalgic and longing for a link to family members long deceased or otherwise estranged. Garrett plans to further develop his voice and find new ways to express thoughts and emotions left unsaid. He hopes to incorporate new experiences and forms into his writing, but will always hold true to the desire to be painfully honest with those who read his work.

  • Brady Connelly is an artist and photographer exploring feelings of empathy, responsibility and guilt using inherited objects, portraiture and performance.

    Visit Brady’s website

  • Mirrah Johnson is a textile artist and seamstress from rural Tennessee. Exploring themes including personal history, myth, and relationship to the natural world, the slow processes Mirrah uses function as resistance to the pace of modern society. At the heart of her creative practice is a passion for education and creating well-made items for others. Along with having a studio practice, she has taught many craft workshops and worked as a professional seamstress. Mirrah completed a BFA at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Tennessee and currently works as textile studio coordinator for Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. Visit Mirrah’s website.

  • Hannah is a multimedia artist, community facilitator, and teacher of emotional-support skills. Her art practice often involves stitching, weaving, watercolors, plant dyes, poetry, and a feeling of being held. She loves co-creating performance art, and empowering others in their creativity and emotional wellbeing. Hannah grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she has a BA in Practice of Art from University of California - Berkeley. Her favorite treats are bubbly water, chai, and a big bowl of buttery popcorn. She lives in the South Toe Valley in Burnsville, North Carolina. Visit Hannah’s website

  • Boston native Matthew Mosher is an intermedia artist, associate professor, and Fulbright Scholar who creates embodied experiential systems. Their work explores the intersections of fine art, computer programming, and critical making resulting in immersive installations, interactive sculptures, post-participatory data visualizations, and dynamic performances. Their projects have engaged themes of meditation, gun violence, digital isolation, and tangible memory. Mosher creates conduits between digital technology and material forms to highlight our complex relationships with machines and each other. Doing so empowers participants in their work to see the world from a new perspective while reexamining their role in society. They received their BFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006 and their MFA in Intermedia from Arizona State University in 2012. Visit Matthew’s website.

  • Heron Bassett holds a BFA from Alfred University, where he concentrated in Ceramics. Before moving to the Spruce Pine area and spending 7 years working in the maintenance department at Penland School of Craft, he worked as a studio assistant for Jun Kaneko. Currently, Heron owns and operates Red Eft Construction. Heron’s creative work spans furniture, painting, sculpture, and ceramics, and is unified by bold colors, good shapes, and joyful forms.

  • Bryan Parnham graduated from the Craft and Material Studies program of Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013. He was awarded the Core Fellowship at Penland School of Craft where his practice focused on metalsmithing and began experimenting with photography. Parnham has been a resident artist or lecturer at Mississippi State University, University of Little Rock Arkansas, California University of Pennsylvania, The Bright Angle and the Society of North American Goldsmiths Conference. In 2020 As Resident Artist in Cortona, Italy his solo exhibition Cos’è Qui, What’s Here was hung at Museo dell’Accademia Etrusca and again in 2021 at The Bridge Gallery in Athens, Georgia. View Bryan’s website.

  • Jordan is an artist living and working in Spruce Pine, NC. Growing up on the east coast, he attended the University of Virginia, where he obtained his BA in both Philosophy and Cognitive Neuroscience. After graduation, he spent the next two in Shargaljuut, Mongolia as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Upon his return, he began his training as a metalsmith, working for two years as a bench jeweler in Virginia. He then moved to Detroit where he was trained as a blacksmith and large scale steel fabricator. Jordan obtained his MFA from San Diego State University’s Furniture Design and Woodworking program. View Jordan’s website.