People
Catskill Weaving School is an artist-run school that offers weaving and weaving-related classes. We are based in Catskill, NY, with classes in Brooklyn and online.
Samantha Bittman, Founder / Instructor
Samantha Bittman is a visual artist and educator based in Woodstock, NY. In her art practice, she works with weaving to generate patterned painting supports, graphic wallpapers, and tiled installations. She has taught weaving for over ten years at various institutions including Rhode Island School of Design, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tyler School of Art, 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 2012, she received the Artadia Award. Recent solo exhibitions include, Various Small Fires, Seoul, Korea; Ronchini, London, UK; Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL; Morgan Lehman, NY, NY; and Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions including David Castillo, Miami, FL; Shane Campbell, Chicago, IL; and Rhona Hoffman, Chicago, IL. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Wall Street International, and The Washington Post, amongst others. 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.
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.
Sophia DeJesus-Sabella, Instructor
Sophia DeJesus-Sabella is an artist, weaver, and educator based in Hartford, Connecticut. Her woven and sculptural works interrogate class, gender, queerness, and utility by combining traditional craft with found construction materials. She has been an Artist in Residence at Byrdcliffe, ACRE, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Hartford Artisans Weaving Center. She has received grants from New England Foundation for the Arts, Assets for Artists, and Northwest Connecticut Arts Council. She graduated with Departmental Honors in Fibers from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
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.
Natalie Stopka, Instructor
Natalie Stopka is an artist and educator who works in collaboration with the materials and forces of the natural world. Her drawings and prints incorporate plant dyes and natural 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 is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and a current MFA candidate at the University of New Mexico.