Fiber Art North East Artist Bios
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Martha Buhl
Nike Cutsumpas
Nike's art is her creative expression of nature with all the inspiration that nature gives her every day.
Demonstrating nature in its many forms through a fantasy perspective allows her boundless diversity in creativity. Creating art with color and fiber is compelling.
Nike makes her art to satisfy herself and hopes that it will please the viewer as a visual feast of color, shape and texture, style and technique.
Jane Davila
Jane is a fiber and mixed media artist who incorporates many printmaking techniques into her work. She teaches printmaking, surface design, art quilting, and art business workshops extensively worldwide.
Repeating motifs of fish, birds, and insects reflect her ongoing fascination with nature, the environment, and human impact.
Tamar Drucker
Tamar has always loved to dream and create art work, so she is drawn to cutting and collaging fabrics, and then quilting. Her inspirations come from books, classical music, traveling, and taking photographs.
Cindy Drake
Cindy has always loved sewing and working with fabric. She hadn't tried quilting until she met and became fast friends with Claire Oehler. Cindy made some baby quilts, pieced quilts, some 70's wall hangings, and 2 squares for the Somers Town Quilt that hangs in the Elephant Hotel.
Cindy later took courses in interior design at Parsons and worked in that field for the next 20 years. I also enjoy gardening, Botanical drawing, and jewelry making.
Cindy is in awe of the talents, creativity, and skills of the members of FANE and is looking forward to quilting again. She loves the idea of smaller works and is inspired to learn some of these interesting new techniques.
Judy Gignesi
Since she got her first Singer sewing machine in 1957, Judy has been sewing; she started quilting in the 1980s, making traditional bed quilts, but over the years has become more involved with mixed media and art quilts.
She loves learning new techniques and exploring new creative possibilities as her work continues to evolve.
Carole Hoffman
Carole became interested in fabric and quilting after initially studying painting and botanical painting in NYC. She began her journey into quilting with traditional designs and techniques, but her earlier training kicked in and the two disciplines merged into a unique and original expression composed of fabric and stitch.
Raina Lynn
Raina is a painter, a quilter, an artist. She is involved in a journey to capture the beautiful lines in life and shine a light on positive imagery for women. Fabric is her painter's palette; she experiments with untraditional materials, colors, and ideas to reflect her passion for line, color, and texture.
Gloria Michaelis
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Nancy Mirman
Nancy has had a passion for quilting for 38 years. She loves the challenge of developing a unique design and the joyful experience of combing fabric until they form a unified whole.
Her inspiration may come from a photograph, a word, or just the fabric itself. Her work has grown from bed quilts to art quilts to fiber art; often combining metal or paper with fabric.
Ashley Mackey
At the age of 39 and needing a creative outlet, Ashley woke up one morning and said to herself, “I think I’ll make a quilt.” Two days later she had a sewing machine, a quick lesson on how to use it, a bag of fabrics, and was registered for a quilting class. Thirty-five years later the journey and joys of quilting and fiber arts continues.
Claire Oehler
Claire’s quilting adventure got a solid foundation by making traditional quilts and learning the “rules” of quiltmaking. Now she embraces art quilting and fiber arts where she can continually experiment with less structured construction methods and the addition of so many wonderful, exciting and creative embellishments as well as the inclusion of different materials such as paper, photographs, yarns, metal and clear plastic. The use of yarns led her to incorporate small bits of knitted and needle-felted pieces into her works. It is a constant joy to be able to create and play with fabric and the broad spectrum of color!
Barbara Sferra
Barbara has been creating art for most of her life in as many different forms and media as she can find. Always drawn to color, especially full, saturated color, many of her hand painted and dyed fabrics figure prominently in her work.
Fiber art is perfect for creating with many of the media and techniques she loves to use. Fabric, threads, stitching, paint, beads and other embellishments find their way into her finished pieces.
Linda Stern
Linda finds art inspiring when it allows her to view something from a new perspective. She often uses experimentation as a starting point for her work, painting and dyeing fabrics as a way to combine her traditional exploration of mark making with her interest in digital imagery. As an Emmy-award winning graphic artist and a high school art educator, she remains most comfortable behind the scenes, enjoying art as a way to interpret the world around her.
Joyce Sullivan
Joyce was already a proficient seamstress when she began quilting in her fifties. As art quilts came on the horizon she embraced the chance to learn new techniques from renowned teachers which provided a background of diverse abilities.
On the brink of turning 90, she has no interest in establishing a business but she credits fiber art with keeping her young. She says, “Membership in FANE keeps me focused and inspired.”
Anne Zimmerman
