About the Artisan

Largely self-taught, Judy was juried as a member of the League of NH Craftsmen in 2003. She is a three-time winner of the Stevens Glass Prize for works exhibited at the League’s Annual Mt. Sunapee Fair. She maintains a studio in her home in Manchester, New Hampshire and has taught fused glass classes at the Currier Museum Art Center in Manchester, NH.

Judy began working with glass when she was unable to find buttons for a vest she had knit. Resigned to making her own buttons, she enrolled somewhat reluctantly in a fusing class. She knew immediately that she had found her medium and within months acquired her first kiln. Since then, she has been honing her craft and developing her own techniques. Textiles continue to inspire her and she is constantly experimenting with ways of translating the structure and surface designs of textiles into the glass. Today Judy creates textile-inspired tableware, as well as one-of-a-kind buttons and closures for other fiber artists.

A graduate of Dartmouth College and the Harvard Divinity School, Judy also works part-time as an ordained minister at the First Congregational Church of Manchester. The rich, transparent jewel tones found in the extraordinary collection of this church's stained glass windows frequently turn up in her work.

Like so many New Englanders, I had a glass-infused childhood without even realizing it. My grandmother lived on Cape Cod and filled her window sills with cranberry glass. My father haunted antique shops and cellar holes looking for interesting glass bottles. I hoarded every scrap of beach glass I could collect and learned to appreciate the greater yield of a rocky beach. Even the school field trips we took were curiously glass-based—going to see the glass flowers at Harvard or visiting the mapparium (a stained glass globe large enough to walk through).