Fafnir Adamites (they/them) holds an MFA degree from the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Photography and Women’s Studies from UMass Amherst. They are an Assistant Professor and Head of the Fiber Area at California State University, Long Beach. Fafnir is an educator, researcher and practicing artist. Their academic and personal research is based in radical, feminist approaches spanning the history of women’s work, counter monuments, inherited trauma and community activism.

Michael Beggs is an architectural designer, artist, independent scholar, and occasional weaver. In 2023, he co-authored the book Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez and Their Students, which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, NC. A former staff member at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, he has written extensively about Black Mountain College and Josef Albers. His other research interests include architectural daylighting, midcentury prefabricated construction techniques, modernist and experimental art and design pedagogy, vernacular architecture, and the films of Éric Rohmer.

Porfirio Gutierrez is a Zapotec - American artist based in Ventura, California. Born and raised in the richly historic Zapotec textile community of Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico. He grew up immersed in color and surrounded by the wildness of Oaxaca's mountains, and by the knowledge of plants for healing and for color. His life's work has been revitalizing and preserving traditional Zapotec natural dye techniques with a focus on reinterpreting traditional textiles and materials.

Fritz Horstman is a curator, educator, author, and artist based in Bethany, Connecticut where he is Education Director at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. He has curated exhibitions across Europe and the United States, including Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper last year at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin. He has lectured and given workshops at Yale University, Harvard University, l'École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, The Royal Academy of Art in London, and many other institutions. His recent book Interacting with Color: A Practical Guide to Josef Albers’s Color Experiments was published by Yale Press in 2024. Current solo exhibitions of his sculptures and prints are on view at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, and Planthouse Gallery in Manhattan.

Christy Matson is a Los Angeles-based artist specializing in woven, wall-mounted works created with a hand-operated Jacquard loom. Her process integrates watercolor, ink, and collage into digital compositions that guide her weaving, blending precision with improvisation. Matson has had solo exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Cranbrook Art Museum, and the Long Beach Museum of Art, and her work has been in numerous group exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Renwick Gallery. Her works are in several permanent collections including LACMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Mint Museum in North Carolina. Matson has held academic appointments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, California State University Long Beach and Harvey Mudd College and is a former board member of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. 

Chandler McWilliams is an artist, writer, and teacher. His practice extends from his philosophical interests and political and personal realities: negotiating ethics, materiality, parenthood, epistemology, domestic life, perception, and anxiety in equal measure. His work complicates the relationship between language and meaning through poetry, anxiety, spatial awareness, scale, language, and materiality. He has exhibited internationally in non-profit and commercial galleries, and art institutions such as the The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Hammer Museum, Commonwealth and Council, LTD Los Angeles, Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, Machine Project, and the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art. McWilliams has a MA in Philosophy from The New School For Social Research in New York City and an MFA from the Program in Art at the California Institute of the Arts.

Romi Ron Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar.  Their work investigates the personal, political, ideological, and spatial boundaries of race, gender, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black diasporic technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world—reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. Their current projects explore theories of Black Computational Thought, entropy, and forms of kinship that thrive in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability.

Romi has exhibited work and given talks at numerous exhibitions, conferences, and workshops around the world including Transmediale (Berlin), The Kitchen (New York), ALT_CPH Biennial (Copenhagen), the American Institute of Architects (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Queens Museum (New York), and the Walker Museum of Art. They have been in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, The School for Poetic Computation, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation. Their writing has appeared in publications by MIT Press, University of California Press, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Logic(s) Magazine. They have taught courses at Parsons School of Design and the University of Southern California (USC). They are currently an Assistant Professor in the Design Media Arts program at UCLA in Los Angeles and a 2024-2026 Just Tech Fellow.

Syona Puliady is curator of textiles of the Eastern Hemisphere at the Fowler Museum of UCLA. Her research expands upon the mobility of people and arts across the Indian Ocean realm and how these movements create notions of intimacy, sensuality, and spirituality that contribute to the greater cultural ethos of this region. As a descendant of a migrant community of weavers herself, Syona also collaborates with artists and garment laborers in Tamil Nadu to explore how these communities imbue their self-expression in visual and performing arts—all of which subtly weave their unique identities into a Tamil landscape.

Lesley Roberts is a multi-disciplinary systems thinker, creative strategist, and cultural producer. She is interested in the drivers of cultural and behavioral change that will help us build the future we want to live in. Lesley is the founder of Material Encounters and the director of the So Cal chapter of Fibershed. She conceived and produced the conferences Material Dialogues, Material & Meaning, and groundwork, as well as the exhibits Sympoiesis making with and Tricksters & Transformation.

She holds a BA in Art History from UCLA and a certificate from UCLA Anderson’s Executive Education program. She is currently enrolled in CSU Chico’s Regenerative Agriculture certificate program and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, MA in Regenerative Design.

Emily Silver is an artist, educator, and curator whose work employs textiles as a form of collage to explore the inconsequential and the un/monumental. Through themes of hoarding, grief, and identity, her practice elevates the conversation around the complexity of shared human experiences. Emily’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent residencies include the Icelandic Textile Residency, the Berlin Textile Co-op, and Jacquard design and weaving studies at Fondazione Arte Lisio in Florence.

Emily oversees the Sculpture Program at Santa Monica College, where she is currently developing a Fiber Program. She is the Director of the Pete and Susan Barrett Gallery and the co-founder of LA Tactile Lab, a tactile//textile school inspired by Black Mountain College, set to open in February 2025. Additionally, she  co-founded Unpaved Gallery in Yucca Valley, CA, the Curate Joshua Tree podcast, and serves as an independent curator for Tidelands in Seattle, Washington.

Emily holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and an MFA from Penn State University.

Cameron Taylor-Brown was introduced to textiles by artist Ed Rossbach at the University of California, Berkeley, and studied textile design at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, where she later taught woven design. Since 1985, she has lived in Los Angeles where she is active in arts and education. Her work is widely exhibited and has been featured in Fiber Art Now, American Craft, Handwoven and Shuttle, Spindle and Dyepot. In 2019, she curated the critically acclaimed exhibit Material Meaning: A Living Legacy of Anni Albers at the Craft in America Center. She is the founder of ARTSgarage, a textile resource center in Los Angeles, and teaches workshops at ARTSgarage, schools, guilds, museums and conferences throughout the United States. She is a past president of California Fibers, serves on the board of Textile Arts LA and is the current president of the UCLA Fowler Museum Textile Council.

Kristine Upesleja is an associate professor at Art Center College of Design where she teaches Material Futures. She is also a lecturer at OTIS. She is the founder of the Innovative Materials Department at former FIDM, and the founder and president of consulting firm MADISONS – Innovative Materials. She is an educator, researcher, connector, curator, and visionary with numerous speaking assignments all around the world. In 2017 she became an annual lecturer at UEDA College of Fashion in Osaka, Japan.

With more than 25 years’ experience in fashion and design, Kristine has a profoundly shaped love for materials. She has been featured as an expert on wearable technology, smart fabrics, and sustainable fashion on several panels and in such publications as French Vogue and LA Magazine.