Kristin Adolfson (co-Treasurer / co-Shop Manager) is a book artist who also practices watercolor, photography, and cooking. Her work engages issues of life, death, Zen Buddhism, and political/social change. She teaches bookbinding and letterpress, is the owner and graphic designer at Still Point Design Studio, and tends bees along with a small vegetable farm and orchard in Nelson County, Virginia.
Bonnie Bernstein is a letterpress printer, writer and naturalist who has been affiliated with Virginia Book Arts since 2005. She first apprenticed at Feathered Serpent Press in California and was proprietor of The Goodmorrow Press before moving east. She has taught letterpress at W&L and especially enjoys collaborating with other book artists.
Jane Freeman is a career gifted education/fine arts administrator who first found book arts at PVCC. She over collects supplies and dives too often into a new medium. List toppers are water features – pool, bay, gulf – new learning, UVA sports, NYT Cooking, and hometown Crozet. Academic degrees: Wake Forest and UVA.
Erica Goldfarb (Chair) was introduced to Book Arts while living in Minneapolis, taking classes at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and has been entranced ever since by the craft, the binding and building of a piece that is unusual, tactile and very original. Two weeks at Haystack in Maine sealed the deal. She is thrilled to be a part of VBA!
Lyall Harris (co-Chair) is a visual artist, writer and educator working in the field of book art for over 15 years. Her artist’s books can be found in many Special Collection libraries across the US. Themes in her work include motherhood, relationships, and the everyday.
Lotta Helleberg is a multimedia book and textile artist, specializing in botanical contact printing, relief processes, and local plant-based dyes. She has taught book arts and natural dye classes locally as well as at Penland School of Crafts, Arrowmont School of Arts and Craft and elsewhere. Involved with the Virginia Book Arts community for decades, Lotta is currently heading the class and programming efforts at VBA.
Nancy Kober (Secretary) is a writer who likes to play with the relationship between words and images through letterpress printing and linocuts. Typesetting is her form of meditation, and type cuts with vintage illustrations are her favorite toys.
Yolanda Merrill is a freelance bookbinder in Lexington, VA, and is an Artisan member of VBA. She specializes in book restoration, but also creates fine bindings and artists’ books. Yolanda teaches a variety of classes at VBA, focusing on techniques, skills and materials.
Kevin McFadden (co-Treasurer) led a collaborative project that documented, hand-printed, and published the Virginia Book Arts type collection in Speaking in Faces: A Type Specimen Book, featuring the largest collection of moveable type available for public use in Virginia. He has instructed letterpress on a Vandercook for more than 20 years and is currently the Chief of Operations for Rare Book School.
Holly Odom (co-Shop Manager) is a letterpress artist and founder of Our Beloved Press. Introduced to printmaking 20 years ago, she draws on her experience practicing printmaking at the University of Tennessee, studying aboard with UGA in Cortona, Italy, and later falling in love with letterpress at Penland School of Craft in NC. Printing is how she shows gratitude to her community: to create art, engage with others, and give away kindness. She is devoted to her 3 daughters and husband, loves the rhythm of summer swim team, and coaches with Girls on the Run. Most days you will find her tending the VBA printshop or at Kindness Cafe.
Liz Schneiders has experimented with monoprint, linocut, letterpress, and book arts with the Dayton (Ohio) Printmakers Cooperative, Larkspur Press in Kentucky, the Virginia Center for the Book, and the Craft Press Printmakers Facebook group. She can often be found making Tetra Pak prints during open studio nights.
Katie Towson grew up in a house built on books, where embossed leather covers and deckled edged pages held worlds full of infinite journeys. She’s a Landscape Architect who remains fascinated by the structure of the book and its ability to stitch content and connections between site, culture and memory.
Amanda Wyatt Visconti (they/them) is VBA Type Librarian. They’re a letterpress broadside printer & zinemaker interested in Vandercook maintenance & non-traditional letterpress techniques, collecting & making zines (including book arts tutorials), lasercutting custom type & printing blocks, and collecting queer and trans letterpress blocks.