MEET THE ARTISTS
Paseo Pottery was founded in 1991 as an artists’ co-op of sorts by three of Santa Fe’s most renowned ceramic artists: Janet Williams, Mike Walsh, and Ginny Zipperer. Below are our current teachers along with their work.
Angela Smith Kirkman is a ceramic artist with over thirty years of experience. She enjoys wild harvesting clay in the mountains of New Mexico and specializes in wood firing as well as saggar, raku, and gas reduction firing.
In 2010, Angela returned from a two-year journey around the world with her husband and three children. During her family’s Big Field Trip, she studied with 12th-generation ceramic artists in Japan, hiked the Inca Trail, rode a dragon boat up the Perfume River, caught the swine flu in Istanbul, motorcycled across Chang Mai, was chased out of the Great Mosque of Uqba in Tunisia, robbed at gunpoint in Bahia, lived on a vineyard in Portugal, rode camelback through the Sahara, snuck into a dilapidated communist headquarters in Bulgaria, taught at a tribal school in Rajasthan, and biked through floating markets in Thailand.
Angela has published dozens of travel stories. Her ceramic art and photography are influenced by travel across five continents and by her beloved home in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she owns Paseo Pottery, Tumbleroot Brewery & Distillery, and Tumbleroot Pottery Pub.
GEORGINA GIBSON
Georgina Gibson, with a background in marine sciences, has explored various art mediums over the years, including painting, drawing, and quilting. However, her introduction to ceramics a few years ago proved to be transformative. Joining the Paseo community in 2022, she initially immersed herself in wheel-throwing classes before transitioning to a role as a studio volunteer. By 2023, she had ventured into teaching. Georgina's artistic journey is marked by her penchant for experimentation, evident in her exploration of a wide range of ceramic techniques. Currently, she finds particular delight in delving into hand-building with colored clay (Nerikomi) and wheel-throwing with wild-harvested clay.
MICHELLE PERRIN
Michelle dabbled in ceramics and painting while working full time, but it wasn’t until she retired in 2023 that she was able to focus on the arts. Michelle (with her husband and two dogs) moved to Santa Fe and turned to painting and pottery to occupy her new-found free time. Currently, she is focused on sculptural hand-building and improving her throwing skills. She says “Paseo Pottery provides the location and the tools necessary to be creative, but what it really provides is community. Working with other artists, celebrating exciting results or mourning the destruction of a favorite piece together make the experience so much more fun. I’m extremely grateful to have Paseo pottery and the artists there in my life. I also love that we give back to the wider community with the pottery throw-downs.” Michelle became a volunteer and started teaching at Paseo Pottery in 2025. She and her husband love hiking and biking in Santa Fe and exploring everything else their new city has to offer. In a prior life, Michelle received a B.B.A. in international business and worked for 30 years in the finance industry.
CLARA MIKOVEC
Clara teaches beginner wheel throwing classes. She graduated from Iowa State with a BFA in Studio Arts and German in May 2022, where she worked closely with her ceramics professor to learn all she could about making pottery. That fall, she moved to New Mexico to train horses and quickly fell in love with Paseo Pottery. Alongside maintaining a personal practice (to pay for her horse), most of her passion for pottery comes from sharing her skills and knowledge with students.
In class she loves making handles, mixing glazes, and helping students fall in love with the ceramic process. A horse girl by day and a pottstress by night, she brings her passion for training to the studio by breaking down the steps to throwing on the wheel into something all students can digest regardless of their learning style. She works hard to cultivate a friendly environment where classmates feel comfortable asking questions and making mistakes as they learn. Her students come away from class with a robust understanding of how to throw, fire, and glaze pieces to meet their expectations.
EMMA JO WYCH
Emma Jo is based out of Santa Fe, NM and started her work with ceramics during college in Flagstaff, AZ. After taking a class on a whim, she quickly fell in love with clay because it made her feel like she could make anything she could possibly dream of. She had an amazing professor who inspired her and made her feel like she would have a career in ceramics, even though she was already two years into a science degree. After taking a gap semester (during which she took another ceramics class at a local community college), she decided to continue on with her degree in science and, as a compromise, take every single ceramics class she could possibly squeeze in. After graduating, Ej quickly found a clay community in Los Alamos and got involved in teaching, glaze making, and firing her own work for the first time. She is now a studio manager at Paseo Pottery and enjoys teaching and being involved in all aspects of the clay process. Ej hopes to have her own small studio one day where she can teach the thing she loves most.
JOAN HENDERSON
Joan has been making pottery on and off for over 40 years, since high school where she had a wonderful pottery art teacher. She attended school for chemistry for a few years before attending the School of Visual Arts in NYC where she obtained a Bachelors degree in Fine Arts, focused on drawing and installation type sculpture. She always came back to pottery though, for its zen like practice; “just” making beautiful utilitarian objects, unburdened by having to consider the meaning behind them. Recently retired from years of teaching in Santa Fe public schools while raising her 2 sons, she is enjoying teaching hand building and wheel throwing classes, while delving back into her own pottery making practice once again.
ANTHONY KUROWSKI
Anthony grew up in Minnesota, where he first began his journey with clay—digging it from lakebeds and firing pieces in open flames (and quickly learning the importance of letting them dry first).
Now based in New Mexico, he has rekindled that early passion at Paseo Pottery. With a background in art, design, and large-scale concrete sculpture, Anthony brings a unique perspective to his ceramic work. He often incorporates intricate carving into his mugs and explores painterly techniques through underglaze decoration.
Inspired primarily by nature and animals, Anthony is continually seeking new sources of inspiration to evolve and expand his creative voice.
Born and raised between the calm beaches and dense forests of Sorsogon, Philippines, Ace is a ceramic artist based in the high desert of Santa Fe. His work explores the intersections of Filipino and American cultures and the ways identity is shaped by migration, memory, and belonging. Working primarily with clay, he combines large wheel-thrown forms with organic sculptural elements, allowing the material to move between vessel and body, structure and landscape.
Ace's work is also a way of reconnecting with Filipino ancestry and precolonial ways of understanding spirituality through clay. He is particularly interested in grief as a shared human experience; something that connects us across cultures, generations, and places. Through his practice, he uses clay as a way to explore what is remembered, what is lost, and what can be carried forward.
JORDAN OLSEN
Jordan (pronouns: he/they) has been working with clay for over 20 years. Beginning with a highschool ceramics class, and later maintaining workspaces in community and home studios, they have practiced mainly in the realm of functional wheel-thrown pottery, with occasional meanderings into sculpture, tile, and jewelry work. Since 2015, Jordan has been involved in building and operating a 'near-wilderness' artist residency on the edge of the Ottawa National Forest in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where participants dig wild clay to process and make work from. They recently earned a degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Minnesota in their hometown of Minneapolis. They love to discuss and investigate the deep and marvelous ways that rocks and minerals are transformed through our manipulations into objects of wonder, usefulness, reflection, and ritual.
Growing up immersed in the world of clay, Izzie’s connection to Paseo Pottery runs deep. With a mother who was a volunteer at the studio's inception, Izzie spent countless hours exploring the art of pottery from a young age. This early exposure sparked a passion that blossomed over the years. In 2019, she began to delve more seriously into pottery, taking and teaching classes at Paseo Pottery. Her dedication and enthusiasm for the craft led to a significant milestone in December 2023, when Izzie was appointed as one of the studio managers. In this role, she not only oversees studio operations but also leads as the kids' class teacher, as well as teaching hand-building and wheel experiences.
SUSAN MCDUFFIE
Susan McDuffie has been making pottery off and on since she was eight years old. After a year at Alfred she was a founding member of the Genesee Coop Pottery in Rochester, NY, until her move to Santa Fe in 1982. She worked with Polly Whitcomb and other artists at the Canyon Road Pottery, and spent twenty-five years as an OT with the SFPS. After a break from clay, Susan is delighted to be back potting and loves the community she’s found at the Paseo Potttery! Influences and inspirations include thrown Japanese folk pottery as well as early Neolithic vessels. Susan currently leads our Kids Camp Program.
ALLISON ATHENS
Allison took her first pottery class as a freshman in high school and like all first loves, it keeps her grounded and coming back for more. Allison’s art practice is a long game exploration to shape ever more intriguing, animated, and snappy forms. In her teaching practice, Allison strives to impart to her students the versatility of clay that encompasses both the joy of self-exploration and the commitment to community-orientation. To Allison, working in clay is a consideration of and an invitation to respond to being in the world as a curious and lively person who is more than willing to speak up and always has something to say. Besides Paseo Pottery, Allison has taught or taken classes in a variety of university classrooms, community studios, and clay residencies in Alaska, Montana, Colorado, California, and Australia.
Lyn Belisle is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose work explores memory, symbolism, and the stories embedded in handmade objects. Working with clay, beeswax, paper, fiber, and found materials, she creates assemblages and sculptural forms inspired by folk traditions, personal talismans, and objects of devotion that honor meaning, place, and memory.
Her signature materials are clay, beeswax, paper, and fiber, and her work can be found in national and international collections, including the Museum of Encaustic Art in Santa Fe and the San Antonio Art League & Museum. In the spring of 2026, she was one of four artists featured in a group exhibition at the Taos Ceramics Center.
A lifelong educator, Lyn received her MA from Trinity University, where she studied studio art as an undergraduate. She teaches mixed-media workshops from her San Antonio studio and throughout the United States and abroad, including Santa Fe, Provincetown, Washington State, Taos, and Mulranny, Ireland. Her current workshop series, Objects of Devotion, invites participants to create personal vessels, guardians, and symbolic figures using humble materials and simple techniques. Rooted in the traditions of folk saints, spirit dolls, reliquaries, and devotional art, these workshops celebrate creativity as a way of preserving memory and expressing meaning.
After retiring from Trinity University's Computer Science Department, Lyn now devotes her time to creating, teaching, and encouraging others to discover the extraordinary possibilities hidden within ordinary materials.