Lee McDonald is a papermaker with a long history of making tools. He has been involved with paper for over 5 decades, starting in the early years of Twinrocker Handmade Paper, and then moving on to making custom moulds, followed by building beaters, presses, and papermaking dryers. His future projects include ensuring how techniques and tools will be available in the future. McDonald is currently working on personal paper projects in his No Name Yet Paper Mill, along with making the mill available to artists – reach out if you’re in the Boston area.

Naomi J. Kendall is an artist based in Somerset in the UK. She completed a Foundation Course at Cheltenham School of Art, pursued a degree in Art History at Leicester University and received a postgraduate diploma at Manchester University in Gallery and Museum Studies. After a career working in galleries and running community arts projects, she returned to making her own work. In 2022 she was the Evolver Magazine Prize winner, she’s a member of the Paper Artist Collective and is featured as a master artisan in the Michelangelo Foundation’s Homo Faber Guide. In 2024, she was accepted as a member of the Royal West of England Artist Network.

Originally from Mexico City, via California, and South Carolina, Paulina Johnson has been immersed in the fields of art and graphic design for over 20 years. She received a joint BFA from the Academy of Art University and the University of San Francisco in 1999. In 2017, she earned an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.  Paulina has been an ongoing educator and is currently an exhibiting partner at Pine Moon Fine Art in Steamboat Springs, CO. She lives and works in beautiful Steamboat where she enjoys the mountains with her husband, two growing boys and their pup Murray.

Carole Kunstadt's works often invoke a metaphysical quality. They reference antique books, music manuscripts, maps and artifacts - deconstructing paper and text and using it in metaphorical ways. Through the manipulation of the materials – history, memory and time merge in a hybrid form.

Born in Boston, Kunstadt spent her childhood in a small New England town, received a BFA from the Hartford Art School in Hartford, Connecticut, and continued with postgraduate studies at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Germany.

Twelve years ago she re-entered a familiar landscape as in her youth, moving to the Hudson Valley, after spending 35 years in NYC.

Dorothy McGuinness is a contemporary basket weaver who lives and works in Everett, Washington. She took her first basketmaking class in 1987 and has studied basket-weaving techniques that have been handed down through the centuries. Dorothy has worked extensively with Jiro Yonezawa, a contemporary Japanese basket maker and teacher. She discovered her medium of choice in 2000, when she took a workshop with Jackie Abrams, who introduced her to watercolor paper as a basket-weaving material. She now works exclusively in diagonal twills and mad weave, creating contemporary sculptural baskets, and enjoys exploring the interplay of weaving, color, and design in her sculptural woven paper pieces.

Matt LaBoone is an origami artist and papermaker in Orlando, Florida, who has a focus on folding and designing insects as origami subjects, and has developed thin and crisp paper especially suited for folding them. Over the years, LaBoone has found that most commercially available papers, and even many origami specific papers are not well suited for what he likes to design and fold, which is what led him to pursue papermaking.

For many origami folders it can be challenging to learn what paper is suitable for what folds and to understand the papermaking process. LaBoone de-mystifies papermaking on his instagram account (@cabbagepaper), where he documents his process. He stresses that there is a hugevalue in using good quality paper for folding.

Galen Gibson-Cornell was born and raised in Maryville, Missouri and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking from Truman State University in 2009, (which included a 2007 study-abroad in Angers, France). He completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Wisconsin in 2013 and then set off on a year-long Fulbright fellowship to Budapest, Hungary. In the following years, Gibson-Cornell traveled to multiple international artist-residency programs, developing a creative practice based on urban exploration and repurposing found materials. His studio has been based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 2017.

Founded nearly 30 years ago by paper designer Marianne Guély, Studio Marianne Guély is an exceptional creative atelier at the crossroads of art, design, and craftsmanship. Specialising in the poetic staging of paper, the studio conjures up immersive worlds where imagination is reignited and stories come to life. Internationally acclaimed, the studio weaves tales and visual narratives that awaken the senses and transport the viewer, sculpting the ephemeral to transform it into a moment of eternity. Each creation is a breath — a suspended instant. Paper, a living material, enters into dialogue with space and imagination alike. Operating within the realm of luxury, Studio Marianne Guély conceives and shapes poetic universes, from the infinitely small to the grandiose, where beauty reveals itself in the precision of detail and the finesse of gesture. Studio Marianne Guély’s mission is to establish the Studio as a leading international reference, celebrating and elevating its unique savoir-faire through bold collaborations, iconic installations, and a lasting imprint on the worlds of art, luxury, and architecture.

Cynthia Nourse Thompson is a Professor and the Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University. Prior to this position, for six years she was Associate Professor and Director of the graduate programs in Book Arts & Printmaking and Studio Art at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA. She has also served as Associate Professor and Curator of Exhibitions at University of Arkansas; twelve years as Professor of Book, Print and Paper Arts and Chair of Fine Arts at Memphis College of Art; and additionally worked at Dieu Donné Papermill, Harlan & Weaver Intaglio and Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper now the Brodsky Center at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

James Ojascastro is an origamist, papermaker, and botanist, with a Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Washington University in St. Louis in collaboration with the Missouri BotanicalGarden. Ojascastro employs a combination of methods – including fiber trait measurements, experimental papermaking, species distribution modeling, andsemistructured interviews – to explore the history, biogeography, and conservation of papermaking traditions (especially of Nepal and Vietnam) through a botanical lens. Outside of academia, Ojascastro uses his researchbackground to guide and inform what plants and which processes will yield paper suitable for origami art.