FRIENDS OF DARD HUNTER: Meet the New ECBOD!

This year's Annual Business Meeting has introduced a new group of officers for the Executive Council and Board of Directors (ECBOD). Keep reading to meet the group! Also, a special introduction to our new Executive Director, Paul Romaine, will be shared with you soon.

President
Jennifer Baker

Jennifer Baker is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on material process and time-based media. Her work features mythological narratives, images of the North American rural Midwest,
and representations of animal and human bodies as they experience the violence of entrapment, ritual, and revolution. She has lectured on hand papermaking, self-publishing, sculpture and semiotics, strategies of visual narrative, and tactility in new media at University of Wisconsin, Columbia College Chicago, and Kansas City Art Institute, among others. Her work has been published in recent issues of Journal of Artist Books and Timber Journal. Recent exhibitions include shows and screenings at the San Francisco Public Library, The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, MO, and the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA. She is the recipient of a Cultural Exchange Grant from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin to support the screening of a collaborative film at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany. Baker received her BA in Fine Art and Psychology from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and her MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis. She currently lives and works in St. Louis where she is curatorial assistant at Pulitzer Arts Foundation, adjunct faculty at Washington University, and where she maintains an active studio practice that includes independent curatorial projects and collaborations. Please visit www.jebaker.com to learn more.

Secretary
Megan Singleton

Megan Singleton is a practicing artist and educator based in St. Louis, Missouri. She is adjunct faculty at Webster University where she teaches Papermaking and Studio Art Courses and has worked as a digital artist for Bruton Stroube Studios since 2005. She received her MFA in sculpture from Louisiana State University in 2012 and her BFA in Photography form Webster University in 2005. Her installations crisscross the boundaries of contemporary craft, combining sculpture, hand papermaking, and digital applications. Her work explores the intersection of dendritic systems and patterns found in waterway, plants, and paths of travel. She actively exhibits nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Megan is a member of the Friends of Dard Hunter, Women's Caucus for Art, and International Art Collective Expanded Draught, based in Galway Ireland.

Treasurer
Kitz Rickert

Currently residing in Durham North Carolina with a loom and fibers, papermaking, bookbinding, and jewelry supplies and a studio that feels like it is in the woods. After ten years of life in the Caribbean, Kitz became inspired in 1995 to make hand made paper and encountered the Friends on the way. Working with Marilyn Sward, Kitz became the assistant Director of the Book and Paper Center at Columbia College, Chicago and the treasurer of IAPMA. Kitz then trained at the bench and worked as a book conservator at Northwestern University for 12 years and a wonderful stint in perennials at Gethsemane Garden Center in Chicago until a move south in November of 2013. Kitz has been Treasurer for the Friends since 2011.

Vice President, Annual Meetings
Marie Bannerot McInerney

Marie Bannerot McInerney is an interdisciplinary studio artist and educator. Her work investigates conceptions of fragility, instability, and experiential knowledge. Using direct printing methods, found objects, and bound materials she carefully creates objects or systems to deconstruct, record, and analyze.

McInerney has exhibited across the United States and abroad including shows at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, WA, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in Saint Louis, MO, Corcoran College in Washington, DC, The Brodsky Center at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in Saint Louis, MO, and The Schiller Garden House at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Her work has been featured in both Sculpture and Fiber Arts Magazine. She worked in the costume and fashion industry for over a decade as a designer and manufacturer of knitwear for SKIF International and as the head dyer/painter at Opera Theatre Saint Louis. McInerney spent her formative years in Houston, TX before earning her BFA in fiber at the Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA in visual art at Washington University in Saint Louis as a Danforth Scholar. She now serves as assistant professor in the fiber department at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Vice President, Publicity & Outreach
Colin Browne

Colin Adlai Alden Browne is a book artist from Southern California. After an introduction to typography and calligraphy at Scripps College Press he received an MFA in Interdisciplinary Book & Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Colin has worked as a bookbinder in Portland, OR, and as an instructor, assistant curator and studio manager of the International Printing Museum in Carson, CA. He is a co-founder of LATACO.COM, a website exploring Los Angeles counter-culture. Colin teaches art in Southern California and operates Tarbeaux Press, a small press specializing in hand-made paper and limited edition printing.

Vice President, Publications
May Babcock

May Babcock is a visual artist based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. She graduated from the University of Connecticut in Storrs with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and printmaking in 2008. Directly after, she joined the graduate printmaking program at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, earning her Masters of Fine Arts degree in 2011.

Her studio processes combine printmaking, hand papermaking, and bookarts techniques, creating artwork that address contemporary landscapes. She gathers sketches and materials from each site to create innovative installations and works on paper.

Babcock exhibits nationally and internationally, and has taught courses in all forms of printmaking, papermaking, drawing and two dimensional design. Additionally, she is the founder of Paperslurry.com, an active blog dedicated to promoting the art and craft of hand papermaking. She is honored to be serving as the Vice President of Publications of Friends of Dard Hunter, and looks forward to helping envision the future of the organization's printed and online presence.

Executive Director

Paul Romaine

Paul Romaine lives in New York City, where he works as part-time Development and Membership Manager at the Center for Book Arts. A librarian by training, Paul has worked as a freelance librarian and editor, and has run operations for a small technology firm where he also cataloged and maintained a library of rare books on printing. Prior to that work he was founding curator of the Gilder Lehrman Collection of American historical documents. His interests include rare books and manuscripts, forgeries, the history of books and printing, and handwriting.

Paul was past president of the American Printing History Association, in which organization he also served in the membership, programs and webmaster roles. He was also past Secretary-Treasurer of the Typophiles, of New York. Paul has a BA in English Literature from Cornell, a Masters in English from Michigan, and a Masters in Library Science from Columbia. In his spare time, he is improving his gluten-free cooking and photography, or struggling with the calligrapher's pen (with limited success).