Originally an Ithaca native, Mara Baldwin has returned to the area this past May after a 10-year trans-national sabbatical during which she received her BA from Wesleyan University in Art History and Studio Art and her MFA from the California College of Arts in Drawing and Textiles. During her travels she worked as an arts educator for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Portland Art Museum (Oregon), the Boys and Girls Club of America, and most recently as an after school and substitute teacher in San Francisco. She has also worked with children in a myriad of other contexts—as a crew coach, lifeguard, swim instructor, and CSA farmer. In May she was invited back to Ithaca as an Artist-in-Residence with the Saltonstall Foundation and since then has taken a position as the Assistant Director at Ithaca College's Handwerker Gallery. She currently shows work with Triple Base Gallery in San Francisco but hopes to continue her studio practice in Ithaca and is looking to line up shows in local businesses for this spring. Her work is founded in drawing and textile installation and is interested in the concepts of haunting and ownership as metaphoric vehicles for human memory. Mara enjoys teaching and providing students with the skills and tools they require for visually interpreting their ideas and environments and looking forward to her classes with CSMA this fall.

Karen Klee-Atlin earned her MFA from the University of Calgary and has taught students of all ages and levels for close to twenty years. She has had the opportunity to live in many places allowing her to explore the culture and visual arts in countries as far away as the Philippines and as near as Mexico. In her studio work Karen likes to use a variety of media and techniques in drawing, painting and printmaking. Although most of her pieces focus on people and places, since moving to Ithaca, she is starting to explore landscape work as well.

Karen Kucharski received her MFA degree from Syracuse University and her BA in Studio Art from Binghamton University. Karen has been on Faculty at CSMA since 2010. She has taught at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Syracuse University, and Ithaca College. Instruction locations also include The Ink Shop Printmaking Center in Ithaca, and Two Rivers Printmaking Studio in White River Junction, VT.

Karen works with light and movement in her drawings, paintings, and hand-pulled prints. She is a recipient of an Artist Crossroads 2011 Grant from NYSCA, administered locally by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes, and her work was chosen for the Regional 2011 Exhibition, Roberson Museum and Science Center (Binghamton, NY). Other exhibition locations include the North Bank Artists Gallery (Vancouver, WA), Blue Heron Gallery (Wyalusing, PA), and onstage with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra at Artpark (Buffalo, NY). Internationally, Karen’s art has been exhibited in Osaka, Japan, and Toronto, Canada.

Nikolai Ruskin grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and has been drawing, painting and sculpting from childhood. He worked for several years in his late teens as an illustrator before moving to upstate New York and discovering a love for traditional music from around the Middle East, spending nearly a decade focused on musical pursuits.

In 2005, Nikolai reconnected with his model making talents while working at Games Workshop in Manhattan, and began crafting scenic projects on commission in 2007, directing his energy full time on miniature scenery for war games. In 2010 Nikolai returned to his long-time home in Ithaca, NY, expanding his miniatures studio to offer ready-made and custom ordered projects for war gaming, dioramas, set design, film and multi-media.

From swaying Redwoods to Asteroid Fields to Kung Fu Teahouses, Nikolai Ruskin has made a multitude of miniature creations. For more examples of miniature scenery projects, check out his website and blog:
website: nikolairuskin.com/miniatures.htm
blog: valleyofisk.blogspot.com

A native Ithacan, Wylie Schwartz received her BA in Journalism and Mass Communications from the University of Georgia, and her MA in the History of European Art from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. As a graduate student, she studied modern and contemporary art history and theory, specializing in the French-American axis of the avant-garde, 1970s landart, as well as ways in which to make art history accessible to the general public. Wylie has worked in educational outreach at Cornell University at the Institute for European Studies, and served for five years as an education docent at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. In 2007, she received a NY State Arts Council Grant to design and teach a month-long pilot program of art history and cultural studies to students at Dryden High School, a course she continues to teach through TST-BOCES as part of an initiative to incorporate art history into the global studies curriculum. In addition to writing as the resident art critic for the Ithaca Times, she owns and manages a small exhibition space for artists out of a studio on her property called Station923 which hosts shows from May through October.

Adrienne Bea Smith has been an art educator and freelance artist for more than twenty years. Originally from Chicago, she has traveled extensively, living in Arizona, France, Sweden, and England. She had the privilege of growing up in a Frank Lloyd Wright house commissioned for her family, which influenced and guided her into a career in the visual arts. Adrienne has a BA in Theater Studies from the University of Illinois, Chicago as well as a BFA (honors) in Painting from Lancashire Polytecehnic (now University of Central Lancashire), Preston, England. Her paintings have been exhibited widely and appear in private collections in Europe and the United States.

While living in England for over twenty years, Adrienne served as arts organizer for the Lancashire Literature Festival and appeared in British pantomime productions. She taught visual arts to adults and children as well as to students with learning difficulties. Adrienne was also an adjunct lecturer at Lancaster and Morecambe Further Education College and Lancaster Adult Education College.

In Sedona, Arizona, she was an adjunct instructor at Yavapai College for three years, teaching watercolor, oil/acrylic and life drawing courses as well as teaching workshops at several parks and recreation and senior citizen community centers. Adrienne is presently an adjunct instructor in drawing and painting at Tompkins Cortland Community College as well as on the faculty of CSMA, teaching drawing and painting to children and adults.

Adrienne and her husband wrote “Art Talk” for the Ithaca Journal. From 2003 until 2011, she was co-director/owner of The Main Street Gallery in Groton, NY.

Greg Tomezsko has a passion for art in all its varied forms which has taken him to study and explore art all over the globe. He has studied in Belgium at the Albert deKooning II Atelier under painter Phillip de Smedt, participated in the Assumption University En Plein Air Faculty Painting Association in Bangkok Thailand, and most recently graduated from the New York Academy of Art. He currently lives in Ithaca with his wife. Although he spends much of his time painting, you may find him poking around the Johnson Art Museum or walking through Buttermilk State Park. When he is not painting he enjoys cooking and watching “30 Rock”. Check out his art at www.tomezsko.com