A little bit about me

I currently teach at Freedom High School in Tampa, FL where I have been for the past eight years. I started teaching painting and drawing classes and as soon as I had the first ceramics class at Freedom, the ceramics program began to grow. Now I have 5 ceramics classes, one drawing class, AP Studio 3D Art and one 3D-1 Art class. I love teaching art, but ceramics and sculpture especially. My parents have a picture of me at 3 years old with my eyebrows furrowed intently working on my playdough masterpiece. Even in high school, I was carving waxes for a local jeweler, Jack VanDell. When I was at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I took a wide assortment of classes: foundry, welding, figure drawing, painting, ceramics sculpture, ceramics throwing and I minored in Art History. After working in Chicago for a few years, I moved back to Florida and enrolled in a post-bach program at UF, studying ceramic sculpture, glazing, firing, and completing at least 3 life sized figures. I was invited to study ceramics at Alfred University and learned a great deal more about glaze chemistry, kiln firing, ceramics history and clay bodies. Then I moved back to FL, and decided to try teaching 2D Art at Eastside High School while the art teacher was on maternity leave. I loved it and I was hooked! The next year, I started teaching at Howard W. Blake School of the Arts and stayed there for ten years teaching, helping with the gallery, coordinating the fundraisers, field trips and special projects. Moving to Freedom High School in 2009 was one of the best choices in my career, as I am happy here at Freedom.
The picture above is from December 2003, when I wrote a proposal to the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg asking if we could please help with the “Chihuly Across Florida” show. I brought 8 students and they let us help the “Chihulagins” with the entire set up. Teresa Winston is on the left and I’m on the right.