Ceramics Faculty

Meet Our

Ceramics Faculty

  •
    Associate Professor of Instruction and Program Head of Ceramics
    Ceramics

    Lauren Sandler

    • Email: lauren.sandler@temple.edu
    • Website: www.laurensandlerstudio.com

    • Lauren Sandler is an artist and educator whose work deconstructs mythologies and investigates narratives of power and perspective. With fragmented forms, allegoric vessels, and mundane assemblages, Sandler contextualizes the layered migrations of material culture to highlight stories obfuscated or erased.

      Sandler exhibits nationally and publishes work and lectures concerning contemporary and historic issues in ceramics. She currently serves on the Board of The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts as Director at Large.

      MFA, Ceramics, Penn State University,...

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  •
    Associate Dean and Associate Professor
    Ceramics

    Chad D. Curtis

    • Email: chad.curtis@temple.edu
    • Phone: 215-777-9167
    • Office: Tyler 210F
    • Website: www.chaddcurtis.com

    • Chad Curtis is an artist and educator who is motivated by politics of the environment, land use, climate change and the evolution of these relationships over time. Visually, Curtis’s work references traditional notions of the sublime landscape and monumental beauty such as vast open spaces, the horizon, trees and mountains. These landscapes represent the very same desires that helped fuel the westward expansion and Manifest Destiny of the United States. In similar ways, digital technology is fueling a worldwide expansion with an equally devastating impact on humanity and the environment....

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  •
    Assistant Professor
    Ceramics

    Roberto Lugo

    • Email: roberto.lugo@temple.edu
    • Phone: 215-777-9201
    • Office: Tyler 150M
    • Website: www.robertolugostudio.com

    • Roberto Lugo is a potter, educator, poet, public speaker and community activist whose work and research explores issues of race, poverty, obesity and inequality. His ceramics vessels appropriate forms and ornament from royal porcelain manufacturers and recontextualize their visual iconography to pay homage to underrepresented people of color. 

      As an educator and activist Lugo’s research focuses on how to create more opportunities for people of color to engage in the visual arts, both as object makers and as culture makers.

      Lugo has conducted over 57...

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  • Adjunct Faculty
    Ceramics

    Charlie Cunningham

    • Email: tuk54866@temple.edu
    • Website: www.charliecunninghamart.com

    • Charlie Cunningham is a studio artist from Connecticut. He is the co-founder of the Orchard Art Collective in Philadelphia. His interdisciplinary background provides students with a multifaceted education in fine arts and professional practice.

      MFA, Pennsylvania State University
      BFA, University of New Haven

  • Adjunct Faculty

    Lauren Mabry

    • Email: tuj81587@temple.edu
    • Website: www.laurenmabry.com

    • Lauren Mabry is an artist and educator currently based in Philadelphia whose highly expressive, colorful work—painted with glazes she mixes from raw materials—blurs the boundaries between ceramics, abstract painting and sculpture.

      MFA, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
      Post Baccalaureate, Colorado State University
      BFA, Kansas City Art Institute

  •
    Adjunct Professor and Artist in Residence

    Michael Dela Dika

    • Email: michael.dika@temple.edu
    • Website: https://michaeldika.com/

    • Michael Dela Dika is a ceramic sculptor and educator born and raised in Accra, Ghana, currently residing in the US with his studio in Philadelphia. Michael's works consider the interplay between organic /inorganic materials, tension, and balance while emphasizing human fragility, vulnerability, and exhaustion in his sculptures. He has shown his works internationally and nationally in  Germany, Turkey, Delaware, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Oregon, Virginia,  and Florida, among others....

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  •
    Adjunct Professor
    Ceramics

    Kukuli Velarde

    • Kukuli Velarde is a Peruvian artist based in the United States since 1987. She has received awards and grants such as the Guggenheim Fellowship (NewYork- 2015), the United States Artists-Knight fellowship (California- 2009), the Pew fellowship in Visual Arts (Pennsylvania2003), the Anonymous is a Woman award (New York- 2000), the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant (New York- 1997), among others. In 2013 her project CORPUS got the Grand Prize at the Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennial in South Korea. She was part of faculty at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022.

      Her...

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  •
    Adjunct Professor
    Ceramics

    L Autumn Gnadinger

    • L Autumn Gnadinger (they/them/theirs) is an artist, writer, and educator originally from Louisville, KY and currently residing in Philadelphia, PA. They received their MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture and have previously studied at Indiana University Southeast (PB), and Transylvania University (BA). They are a former Core Fellow of Penland School of Craft and are an editor and co-founder of the journal ...

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