2024 Jurors
Fabio J. Fernández
Fabio J. Fernández is Director of Greenwich House Pottery, an historic nonprofit organization located in NYC. He is the former Executive Director of the Society of Arts + Crafts in Boston. Fernández also served as the Exhibitions Director at the Society and as Associate Curator at Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He served as a Trustee of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine
and has been a visiting critic at universities around the country. Fernández holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and a Bachelor of Science degree in business from Seton Hall University in New Jersey.
Ursula Ilse-Neuman
Ursula Ilse-Neuman is Curator Emerita at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, where she curated more than forty exhibitions in all craft media. Her guest curated exhibitions include World Craft Council’s “Abhushan,” New Delhi, India; The Jewelry of Ideas: Gifts from the Susan Grant Lewin Collection, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; NY Ring Redux: The Susan Grant Lewin Collection, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; “Stirring Voices from an Ancient Land”, Metalsmith exhibition, and the upcoming “Studio Jewelry and Beyond,” FIU Wolfsonian Museum, Miami, FL.
She has been a juror and lecturer for national and international museums including Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; International Jewelry Expo, Shanghai, China; Sonderschau Schmuck, Munich, Germany; and, Holon Design Museum, Holon, Israel.
Josephine Shea
Josephine Shea is the Art Bridges Cohort Program curatorial coordinator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The goal of the grant-funded initiative is to share American art with eight partner museums across Pennsylvania. Previously, she was the curator at Edsel & Eleanor Ford House outside of Detroit, overseeing the family’s important fine and decorative arts collection and managing exhibitions. Her craft exhibitions and installations include PMA’s Rookwood vases in conversation with Andrew Raftery’s Autobiography of a Garden plates and the 2023 invitational Beyond Glass at the Wayne Art Center. An overview of craft as it developed in Detroit appears in Taming the Beast: Silver by Earl Krentzin.
With an M.A. in the History of Decorative Arts from the Corcoran College of Art & Design and the Smithsonian Institution, she taught at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at George Washington University.