Episodes
Simon Arizpe is an award winning pop-up book designer, paper engineer and illustrator based in Brooklyn, NY. His work received the 2018-2019 Meggendorfer Prize, the highest honor in pop-up book design, as well as the Award of Excellence from the Society of Illustrators. A graduate of The Pratt Institute, Arizpe worked for over 10 years as the senior paper engineer at several of the top pop-up book studios in the world before opening his own pop-up book studio in 2014. Working on every aspect...
Published 01/05/23
Helen Hiebert is the author of six instructional books on papermaking and papercrafts and is widely respected as a generous teacher and mentor. Working from her studio in Colorado, Helen hosts classes and retreats, and extends her outreach by teaching online. Her weekly Sunday Paper Blog keeps the field up-to-date regarding a wide range of paper artists and paper-related news. Her monthly Paper Talk podcast series features recorded interviews with papermakers, paper artists, paper engineers,...
Published 12/09/22
Susan Ruptash is a Toronto washi artist who works in a variety of paper arts including explorations of handmade heritage washi, printmaking and bookmaking, building on a lifelong fascination with the properties and possibilities of paper. Ruptash’s career as an architect has informed her explorations of structure, form, materiality and process. She is a member of Propeller Art Gallery, Open Studio, and the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild. Ruptash’s work often includes embedded...
Published 11/18/22
Roberto Mannino explores form with an abstract, process oriented, non-realistic approach. In Papermaking the very fact that there is a molecular change from liquid to solid implies the presence of natural energies that are embedded in the process itself. His hands-on practice enables him to have a dialogue with the nature of things in relation to his own personal motivations.
Published 10/29/22
Bruce Foster has paper engineered over 65 pop-up books, over 100 pop-up cards, and at least a dozen other unpublished works. Originally from southern Louisiana, Bruce attended art school at The University of Tennessee in Knoxville, earning his BFA with honors and returning later for graduate studies in studio art. Eventually settling in Houston, TX, he worked as a graphic designer and art director before discovering and launching a career in movable books in 1989, although it was not until...
Published 09/21/22
Sara Garden Armstrong is a visual artist whose decades-long practice embraces a wide range of scales and techniques, from large site-specific sculpture to artist’s books. Lyrical, nature-based biomorphic abstraction characterizes the work, focusing on life processes and systems. It addresses organic change and transformation, while exploring properties of materials. Armstrong received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama and a Master of Art Education from UAB. After living...
Published 09/02/22
Russell Maret is a book artist and letter designer working in New York City. He began printing in San Francisco as a teenager before apprenticing with Peter Koch in Berkeley and Firefly Press in Somerville, Massachusetts. He set up his own press at the Center for Book Arts, New York in 1993 and has been printing and publishing ever since. In 1996 Russell began teaching himself to design letterforms, leading to a twelve year study of letterforms before he completed his first typeface in 2008....
Published 08/09/22
Tom Balbo has spent most of his life in and around Cleveland, Ohio. His earliest work was primarily in ceramics and printmaking. As his interest in papermaking grew, his work turned towards expressing his artistic creativity in this area. Over the past 40 years, Balbo's work has been exhibited and shown in a large number of shows and galleries, and he has garnered numerous awards and critical attention for his artwork. In 2008, Balbo founded The Morgan Art of Paper Conservatory and...
Published 07/16/22
Marianne R. Petit is an artist and educator whose work explores fairy tales, anatomical obsessions, graphic and narrative medicine, as well as collective storytelling practices through mechanical books that combine animation and paper craft. Her interests are in combining technology, traditional book arts, and sequential storytelling to create new forms of narrative for the 21st century. Her movable books can be found in numerous museum and library collections. Her artwork has appeared...
Published 06/24/22
Owen Gildersleeve is an artist specializing in handcrafted illustration, set design & art direction. His unique style honed over the past 12 years brings graphic designs to life through layers of hand-cut paper and a playful use of depth & shadow. His practice ranges from intricate illustrations, to large-scale sets and installations, teaming up with the likes of Apple, LUSH, Penguin Books & NASA.
Published 06/03/22
Gill Wilson's background is rooted in craft practice, and she has had a papermaking studio for over 30 years. She studied papermaking in Japan after University. Since then, she has been a university lecturer and has worked as an advisor for Arts Council England. She was the manager of the Harley Gallery and is currently a director of Gallerytop.
Published 05/10/22
Cathryn Miller has had an interest in making things out of paper since early childhood, and still believes that anything —except, perhaps, internal combustion engines— can be made out of paper. After being sidetracked in adult life by a short career as a theatrical designer, then a twenty year career as a textile artist, Miller returned to playing with paper in 1994. Since then, as Byopia Press, Miller has published limited editions of conventional books and produced multiple artist’s books,...
Published 04/23/22
Molly Grosse is co-founder of Rock Paper Store and an artist who works in a variety of mediums. Prior to founding Rock Paper Store, she worked as a wedding photographer, and her initial explorations with the paper were wedding products, like party favor boxes, invitations or waterproof flowers. Now we’ll be talking about what Rock Paper is, but once Molly dove into the process of making this paper from rocks (which her mother invented), she began exploring the best way to mix colors and...
Published 04/02/22
I interviewed Nicole Magistro, the author/publisher and Alice Feagan, the illustrator of the picture book, Read Island. Join a very brave girl and her furry friends on an adventure to Read Island! Through the power of imagination and the pleasure of reading, this curious trio set sail for a magical island made of books. On their way they discover a joyful collection of animals converging by sea and land, just in time for an unforgettable story hour. Nicole Magistro is the author and...
Published 03/12/22
Kelli Anderson is a designer and paper engineer whose work operates in the space between conceptual art, graphic design, and tech. Her whimsical books have featured a working paper planetarium, a pop-up pinhole camera, and a paper record player. Whenever she can, she uses humble, lo-fi materials to expose the invisible magic of the world and make abstract concepts real and tangible. Anderson's work puts forth the idea that lo-fi, handheld experiences can challenge the notion of tech as an...
Published 02/19/22
Maro Vandorou is a visual artist of Greek origin, who is living and working in California. Her formal training has a strong interdisciplinary character informed by studies in the visual arts, interaction design, literature, psychology, digital and computer technologies. Her work explores the process of transformation through installations of original photographic material, writings, and artists’ books. Her tools of choice are film cameras, Gampi – a rare Japanese handmade paper – and...
Published 01/29/22
As Storey’s publisher and editorial director, Deborah Balmuth heads up efforts to acquire and publish outstanding, long-lasting nonfiction books that support Story Publishing’s mission of promoting personal independence in harmony with the environment. She works with a group of passionate editors who seek out promotable authors with deep, hands-on knowledge and wisdom on topics ranging from gardening and farming to crafts, cooking, building, outdoor living, natural well-being, and creativity...
Published 01/08/22
Radha Pandey is a papermaker and letterpress printer. She earned her MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa Center for the Book where she studied Letterpress printing, Bookbinding, and Papermaking with a focus on Western, Eastern and Indo-Islamic Papermaking techniques. Her artist’s books are held in numerous public collections, she has lectured and taught workshops on Indo-Islamic papermaking around the world, and she is currently working on an artists book inspired by Mughal miniature...
Published 12/16/21
Susan Kristoferson specializes in surface design processes on paper such as itajime (Japanese fold, clamp, and dye) and hand painted paste papers, She lives and works in Turner Valley, Alberta, in Canada, on hilltop with a view of the foothills and Rockies along with her husband and a small farm of chickens and sheep. Kristoferson is inspired by the long-distance view from her home and studio where she creates unique landscape “paintings” and abstract images using the papers she has made,...
Published 11/26/21
Jerushia Graham is the Museum Coordinator for the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking and a working artist. Graham is interested in creating spaces for socially-minded introspection and empathy through her artwork, workshops, and curatorial projects. The Atlanta-based printmaker, papermaker, book artist, and fiber artist who exhibits both nationally and internationally, and is a member of the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color, the Movable Book Society, and the North American Hand...
Published 11/06/21
Nicholas Cladis is an interdisciplinary artist and papermaker who lives and works in Iowa City, IA. He is the papermaking specialist at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, where he lectures and manages the Oakdale paper research facility. Cladis is an active researcher and practitioner of traditional and non-traditional papermaking processes. For six years he lived and worked in Echizen, Japan — an area with over 1,500 years of papermaking history — and continues to maintain an active...
Published 10/16/21
Entrepreneur, educator and origami artist Miri Golan hopes to use her installations as a catalyst to unite people of different religious and cultural backgrounds. Many of her works use the book as a symbol of education, wisdom, and spirituality—ideas that can be used to help bring people on opposite sides of conflicts together. Her sculptures incorporate a variety of spiritual texts in unexpected ways and suggest that despite religious differences, people are fundamentally the same. She is...
Published 09/25/21
June Tyler has been a visual artist for over 40 years and been involved in papermaking for 32 years. Her studio, Pondside Pulp and Paper was established in 1995 in Norwich, NY, where she has offered workshops during the summer and fall months. Tyler has spent most of her professional career teaching at various colleges, as well as offering workshops at her studio and other venues. Tyler likes to work in a variety of media: Painting, drawing, printmaking, artist books, papermaking, sculpture...
Published 09/04/21
Paul Jackson is a professional paper artist, paper engineer, writer and teacher since 1983, who specializes in origami and the folded arts.  Jackson has written more than 40 books, the first of which were origami books for adults and children, and his more recent books have been about the application of folding techniques into design, a subject he has taught in more than 80 Universities and Colleges in 13 countries, to design students of many disciplines, including Fashion, Architecture,...
Published 08/14/21
Amy Richard is a native of Miami, Florida. After working for many years as an artist/illustrator, science writer and educator, a fascination with hand papermaking processes led her to complete an MFA in Book Arts at the University of Iowa. Her focus was on Japanese-style papermaking, along with the history, traditions, and the spiritual/ healing aspects of the practice. Heavily influenced by the cycles of life, much of Richard’s work is a response to the metaphysical energy exhibited in...
Published 07/22/21