Residency Information & Application

Jesse Baggett received an MFA in Ceramic Art from West Virginia University and a BFA with a Teaching Certificate from Midwestern State University. She has taught high school art and introductory ceramics courses and has participated in artist residencies at Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, Red Lodge Clay Center, Jingdezhen Ceramic University, and the SanBao Ceramic Art Institute. In 2023, she served as a collaborating artist on the National Endowment for the Arts ceramic mural Better Together in Wichita Falls, Texas.

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Baggett's sculptural work brings to life a cast of Southwestern animal characters within playful, toy-like environments. Inspired by personal experiences, her narratives celebrate the friendships and adventures that make up life's journey.

Casey Burton was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. She received a BFA in ceramics from the University of Iowa in 2019 and continued her exploration with clay at the University of Kansas as a post-baccalaureate student. In 2020, Casey moved to Northern California, where she was an artist-in-residence at Cobb Mountain Art & Ecology Project. These two years were formative in deepening her connection to the land and cultivating a desire to engage with it more intentionally. In 2024, she received her MFA from Penn State University. There she was honored with the Kiki Smith Fellowship at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the Creative Achievement Award. After graduate school, Casey taught Transitions and Ceramics courses as an adjunct professor at Saint Xavier University and worked in floriculture at Garfield Conservatory in Chicago, IL.

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Casey’s work weaves together care, embodied experience, and the tension between the eternal and the ephemeral. Through working with earth matter, she creates sculptures and installations that explore healing and the complexities of identity. This physical dialogue becomes a grounding ritual—an exploration of tenderness, endurance, and self-preservation. By shaping materials with her body, she mourns past selves and memories while celebrating the rewilding of self, an act of renewal.

Kai Fukunaga is a Japanese American ceramic artist born to a Japanese father and an American mother. Raised between cultures, she is interested in how seemingly insignificant moments, repeated gestures, and everyday environments quietly shape identity over time. This sensibility informs her process, where she creates latticed forms through an accumulation of individual clay elements that explore repetition, pattern, rhythm, and embodied memory, while engaging tensions between fragility and permanence.

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Fukunaga earned a Bachelor of Science in Hotel Administration from Cornell University in 2014 before moving to New York City, where she worked as a commercial kitchen designer. She began working with ceramics in 2018 at a local studio, later pursuing a BA (Hons) in Ceramics at Cardiff Metropolitan University in Wales, which she received in 2025. She has interned at Anderson Ranch Arts Center and Starworks Ceramics, and her work has been exhibited across the United States and the United Kingdom.

Jack Schwarze is a Montana raised artist. He received his BFA from Montana State University in his hometown of Bozeman in 2019. Jack went on to complete artist residencies at Cobb Mountain Art and Ecology and Red Lodge Clay Center. Most recently he has worked as a studio assistant for Casey Zablocki.  

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The aesthetic of decay—where objects and structures slowly lose their purpose—is central to my work. Through my exploration of these themes, I aim to reflect on the ways in which technology and industry have shaped our environment, while acknowledging the complex relationship between progress and the land. I am deeply moved by the beauty found in this degradation, as well as the questions it raises about sustainability, consumption, and waste.

Born in rural North Carolina with Mexican ancestry, Jillian Mae Seversky is a trans ceramic artist who uses red clay to evoke place and memory. They received a BFA in Arts Education with a concentration in ceramics from Appalachian State University, where they worked and taught at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts. Seversky’s work was included in the official 2026 NCECA exhibition and has been shown in national and regional galleries, including, Workhouse Arts Center, 120710 Gallery, Florence Thomas Art School, The Mana Contemporary, Mudflat Studio, and Scenic City Clay Arts.

A former studio assistant to Andréa Keys Connell, Seversky has also served as an assistant at Penland School of Craft and at the 2025 Utilitarian Clay Conference at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, where they were also a two-time Pentaculum resident and a 12-week work-study participant.

Goedele Vanhille has worked with clay for most of her life. It is how she expresses,

processes and experiences the world.

She grew up in Belgium where she earned a degree in Ceramics in 1983, after which she

attended the Tuscarora Pottery School in Nevada. Back in Belgium, she had a studio

practice for several years, making both functional and sculptural ceramics. She returned to the US for another stay at the Tuscarora Pottery School. Then she was invited to be a “special student” with Paul Soldner in Claremont, CA. She settled in South-West Colorado where she had a professional studio practice. She has shown and sold work in galleries throughout the South-West for over 36 years.

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Her work has danced between form and function, toying with the delicate line when a vessel becomes a housing for something intangible, something felt or imagined. She draws inspiration from the landscape around her and what lives in it; the birds, chestnuts,

grasshoppers and wildflowers. She explores what it means to be human with all it’s rage,

sorrow and joy.

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She recently moved back to Belgium, where she is rebuilding her studio practice. She is excited to be at the Clay Studio this summer to continue her journey into

the landscapes of life.