INSTRUCTOR'S BIOS

Women's Studio Center

INSTRUCTOR'S BIOS

VISUAL ARTS INSTRUCTORS

SHELLI ROBINER ARDIZZONE

is a life member of the Art Students League where she has a Merit Scholarship this year. Her fine art work (she does oil painting and pastel) and her decorative painting installations (with ArtZone Decorative Painting since 1986) are seen in the tri-state area and across the U.S. The Flower Painting Workshop is a tribute and memorial to her mentor and instructor, Lisa Specht, who held a similar workshop in June for 20 years.

FRANCINE PERLMAN

is an award winning artist and past president of Ceres Gallery, now located in Chelsea. Her solo exhibitions include installations at Fine Art Gallery, Westchester Community College, “Rooms” construction at Ceres Gallery, and others. She taught at the Learning Annes, City College, and Riverdale Country School.

MARIA SPECTOR

received her MFA in painting from Queens College in 1999, her BA from Binghamton University and a Masters in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Through Queens Council on the Arts Ms. Spector has received a Queens Community Arts Fund Grant via a regrant from New York State Council on the Arts and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Exhibits include P.S. 122, NURTUREart Gallery, HEREart Gallery and Gallery Korea as well as the Anchorage Museum of History and art (Alaska). She has curated numerous exhibitions in New York.

MELISSA WOLF

is the Executive Director of Women's Studio Center. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Southampton College, Long Island University. She completed graduate work at The School of Visual Arts in both Graphic Design/Advertising and Art Education and has a Certificate in Arts Administration from NYU. She is a member of ArtTable - an organization for women arts professionals and has a Certificate of Appreciation and is on the Visual Arts Committee of ASTRAEA Lesbian Foundation for Justics. She worked for 10 years in the art supply retail industry, has exhibited widely and has curated and organized over 35 exhibitions

JENNIFER WROBLEWSKI

is an award winning artist who has exhibited widely. She has an MFA from the New York Academy where she focused on drawing and the University of Pennsylvania where she minored in fine arts. Exhibits include AirSpace Gallery, Artist's Space, Flux Factory, Telomere Projects in Williamsburg and many others. She has a studio in Juvenal Reis Studios across the street from Women's Studio Center.

WRITING INSTRUCTORS

CHRISTINE HAMM

is a psychiatric social worker and has an M.A. in Creative Writing, Her poetry has been published in several online and print publications including: "Poetry Midwest", "Exquisite Corpse", "Rattle", "The Absinthe Literary Review", and over 50 others. She was recently a finalist in the "Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest" and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her book of poetry, "Salt Daughter", is due out from Little Poem Press later this year, and she has another book out from Dancing Girl Press in April of next year. She teaches English at the College of New Rochelle. She was the literary editor of "Wide Angle", a monthly cultural journal. She is currently working as a freelance editor and on the editorial board of "Vernacular", Women's Studio Centers online literary journal. She is also currently serving on the Board of Directors of Women's Studio Center as Acting Director of Literature

BEV JAFEK

Bev Jafek has published 20 of her stories in the literary quarterly and university press publications. They have also been translated into German, Italian and Dutch and have won many literary awards, including: publication in the annual prize anthologies, The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize; the Carlos Fuentes Award and the Editor's Prize for fiction from Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry & Prose; as well as first prize in the 2001 Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation short story competition for redemption of gay history through creative writing. She was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford. A collection of my short fiction, The Man Who Took a Bite Out of His Wife was published by The Overlook Press in 1993, reprinted in paperback in 1995, and won the Crawford Award (ten best new fantasy writers) as well as being cited as one of the best story collections of the year in The Year's Best Fantasy, 7th edition.