Debbie Wu

Debbie Wu is a resident of San Francisco and Bay Area native, Debbie has a passion for making arts & crafts.  She is an Art Educator who has been teaching students at various elementary schools and community organization in the Bay Area for more than 10 years.  Debbie enjoys working with young people helping them explore their creativity.  She has an MBA from Santa Clara University and a BA in Economics from U.C. Davis. In her own art practice, Debbie works with a variety of media including fused glass, clay, mosaic, mixed media, and jewelry.

Jeff Sutton

Jeff Sutton began as a studio assistant both the Glass and Metal Arts department a couple years ago; he now teaches in both departments, as the leaded glass and youth enameling instructor. 

Jacqueline Ruben

Jacqueline Ruben attended the San Francisco Art Institute and received her Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her mixed media drawings and paintings explore ecological and spiritual concerns of underground streams, rivers turning into freeways and mountaintop removal–unlike the traditional pristine landscape images. 

Dottie Low

Dottie Low graduated from San Francisco State University with a major in Ceramics. She has been teaching wheel-throwing and hand-building in the Ceramics Department since 1994, and encourages students to refine their skills and expand their imaginations on a daily basis. She had a one woman ceramics exhibition, “Breaking The Mold”, at the Chinese Culture Center, presenting four decades of ceramic art. Dottie designed and led a group of volunteers for the Ceramic Tile Project, the Ceramic Steps in the Children’s Playground, in Golden Gate Park. She continues to travel to study ceramics from different cultures and is the proud grandmother of her newborn granddaughter. 

Lynn Wood

Lynn Wood, The texture queen, has had clay as a joy in her life since early childhood. The ability to play and explore the endless possibilities with this medium, furthers her  creative pleasure.

Yuko Sato

Yuko Sato, began studying pottery at art college in Tokyo. Since moving to San Francisco in 1996, she has continued working with clay, both hand-building and on the wheel.

Mara Ramirez

Mara Ramirez is a nonbinary artist, educator, and caregiver making comics in the Bay Area, California. Their comics are mainly autobiographical and somewhat experimental, and concern matters of intimacy, trauma, and healing. They play with abstraction and the action of mark making as a means of distorting (and in doing so, clarifying) their own experiences through the filter of emotion and memory. These stories range in content: existentialism, gender, and childcare are some of the topics that have emphasis.

Elizabeth (Liz) Liu

Elizabeth (Liz) Liu has a BFA in Ceramics from San Francisco State University. She has been playing with clay at the Studio since 1992, and has studied under many Studio instructors, continuing to learn from them and her students on the daily. She teaches Ceramics and is a vital resource for Open Studio; she enjoys the clay chores and all the potlucks that the ceramics department is famous for.

Alan Tarbell

Alan Tarbell is a mixed media painter who is aesthetically inspired by nature’s infinite combination of form, light, texture, atmosphere and rhythm. Exposure through travel and exploration into diverse physical and cultural environments formulate his conceptual approach. His work has been widely reviewed in Mexico where he lived from 2002-2008.He currently lives and works from his studio in Oakland, CA. Alan also teaches painting and drawing at the Richmond Art Center, the ASUC Berkeley and the Sharon Art Studio in San Francisco. His work is held by numerous private collectors in Mexico and the US.

Rhonda Rungsitiyakorn

Rhonda Rungsitiyakorn started at the studio 6 years ago and teaches knitting classes.  This creative, down to earth kindred spirit is also a retired nurse, who is very nurturing with her students, which is reflected in her class instruction.   She also teaches handwork at the Golden Bridges School, San Francisco’s first urban farm school, an ecology-infused, holistic education that nourishes children and families’ heads, hearts and hands.

Katina Price

Katina Price has been teaching at the Studio for more than a decade in the Ceramics department, working with youth, teens, and adults. 

Joy-Lily

Joy-Lily worked as a graphic designer and illustrator in New York for 16 years. She brings her design sensibility to her work as a fiber artist in silk painting, felting, shibori, batik, natural dyeing, quilting and fabric collage. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Santa Fe, Hanover Germany and Beijing. She recently had a very successful solo show of her art quilts in San Francisco. She has taught fiber media at art centers, fiber art groups, quilt guilds, community centers and for adult education districts since 1989. Her teaching style is informal and supportive, insuring that students exploring a new medium will create art they love on their first try.