Instructors
Our Regular Instructors
Barbara Abbott
Barbara has an MFA in costume design for theatre along with 18 years’ experience in that field. From pattern making, to historical corsetry, millinery to magical teacups, Barbara has a broad range of experience in the costume shop.
In recent years, she has discovered a love of visible mending and hand sewing as a means of making art, creatively maintaining clothing items she loves, and slowing down in a busy world. Barbara loves sharing her knowledge, skill, and love for the craft blending patience, good humor, and the mantra that mistakes give us opportunities for creative solutions.
McKenna Lenhart
McKenna grew up just outside of Denver, Colorado, and has called California’s Central Coast home for the past decade. She earned her B.S. in Environmental Science with a minor in Fine Arts from California Lutheran University, blending her love of the natural world with her creative practice.
Her work spans a wide range of mediums—from painting, printmaking, and graphic design to cob building and landscape design. McKenna serves as a Director of a garden-based education nonprofit, One Cool Earth, and also runs her small art business, Juniper Blue. She is excited to share her passion for art - encouraging students to explore, play, and find their own creative voice.
Jessica Jelinksi
A child of the Santa Monica Mountains, Jess's love for the earth and connecting with humans led her to Hawaii's big Island. There, she worked with at risk youth through immersive rites of passage ceremonies, focused on healing and developing a north star for their lives. Jess now mentors Central Coast youth and adults in nature connection practices, ancestral arts, and transformative experiences with Outside Now, a local nonprofit.
Jess is also the steward of Spiral Sister Designs, a creative project that celebrates the beauty of the ocean and Aloha, feminine spirit. Her jewelry features discovered abalone shell through slow, prayerful jewelry techniques, such as bead weaving. Each of these pieces is unique and tells a story of the dance between humans and nature. It is her hope that these artistic practices help humans reconnect with the beauty and sacredness of life. You can find out more at spiralsisterdesigns.com.
Felise Gutierrez
Felise Gutierrez is an artist, educator, and nature-connection mentor based on California’s Central Coast. Her practice centers on natural dye as a medium for cultivating relationships between self, land, and the materials that shape everyday life. Her study of natural dyes began in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2023 and has since evolved into a dedicated practice and teaching platform. With a background in Environmental Management and Agroecology, Felise brings a holistic understanding of land and natural material systems to her practice. Through making and teaching, she invites a return to place-based, embodied relationships with the natural world.
Shari Sullivan
Shari Sullivan has yet to meet an art medium she doesn’t love. While her primary artistic focus is metalsmithing, her creative practice also includes mixed media and painting, book arts, and fiber arts. She holds a BA in Studio Art with an emphasis in both painting and small metals/jewelry. Most recently, her artistic explorations have brought her to studies in traditional Italian goldsmithing techniques in Florence, Italy. Shari’s journey into book arts began when she worked as an assistant to Shereen LaPlantz, author of Cover to Cover, which was considered the definitive guide to the art of creative bookbinding in the '90s.
A proud perpetual student of art and art history, Shari has used artmaking as a gateway to exploration—guiding her to the streets, museums, and workshops of Florence, Venice, and Paris, where she has studied Renaissance and contemporary craft and history. Shari has taught art and other subjects to students aged 5 to 75+ in a non-credentialed capacity over the past 30 years. She enjoys sharing techniques, encouraging experimentation, and helping students discover the joy of working across materials.
Marjorie Rehbach
Marjorie spent half of her life in the Midwest and the other half exploring Europe, both coasts of the US, and the Southwest. She has been involved with Waldorf Education as teacher, administrator, and therapist, for around 50 years. This allowed her to dive deeply into the arts as a way of life, eventually specializing in puppetry, storytelling, and needle felting. Marjorie enjoys sharing these skills and inspiring others to live and express creatively through fiber and puppetry.
Caroline Smith
Caroline spent her childhood in Western Maryland before wandering West and eventually landing on the San Juan Islands. There, she fell into a lively community of artists, makers, an regenerative farmers. Upon moving to Los Osos a few years ago, Caroline found her way into a similar community here on the Central Coast.
Caroline works within a few modalities, including fiber arts, poetry, natural dyes, floral design, and hide tanning. She is thrilled to be able to share these practical and ancestral skills with folks of all ages throughout SLO County. She believes that working with our hands allows us to connect more deeply with our hearts, creative spirits, intuition, and those who crafted before us.
Lily Nash
Lily’s art practice explores the connective, sensory experience of working with fabric, a needle, and thread. She believes that the ancestral and embodied experience of hand-stitching is a conduit for connecting communities and generations. Raised in Long Beach, California, Lily attended UC Santa Cruz, graduating with a B.A. in Art.
Lily has experience teaching after school art programs, summer camps, adult workshops, and community art projects. Most recently, Lily was an artist-in-residence at Alchemy Art Center on San Juan Island, WA. During her residency, she taught numerous quilting workshops and hosted a weekly ferry-based sewing circle. She now resides on the Central Coast and looks forward to teaching and building creative community.
Amy Beams
Based in Atascadero, Amy Beams is a silversmith and the owner of Golden State Goods—a shop dedicated to vintage clothing, art, and local, handmade wares. After a 15-year career in apparel design and production, Amy now shares her passion for craft and creativity through jewelry design and workshops, celebrating and developing the silversmith movement within the SLO County community.
James Hovarth
James brings over 20 years of experience in teaching ancestral art and primitive skills, blending hands-on expertise with a deep passion for reviving traditional techniques.
Through immersive workshops, he introduces students to the timeless practices of craftsmanship, utilizing natural tools and materials. By guiding learners in the creation of functional art, James fosters a greater understanding of cultural heritage, self-sufficiency, and environmental stewardship, helping them reconnect with the earth and the wisdom of their ancestors.
Cooper Willson
Cooper is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, illustration, writing, and storytelling. His work explores emotion, imagination, and the subtle ways visuals can communicate feeling beyond words. He is especially drawn to color, texture, and composition as tools for storytelling, whether in bold abstracts or narrative scenes.
Cooper loves helping others tap into their own creative voice and trust their instincts. His goal is to create spaces where people feel free to experiment, play, and story-tell in a way that is true to them.
Ariann Landaverde
Growing up in Southern California, Ariann moved to the Central Coast to attend CalPoly. graduating with a degree in Environmental Management and Protection, with minors in both Biology and Spanish. She soon began her journey in garden-based education with One Cool Earth, where she currently serves as a Regional Manager.
As she explored her passion for outdoor garden education, she deepened her love for art and its connection to the environment. Through painting, flower pressing, nature journaling, and plant guides, she discovered a beautiful bridge for students to connect with the natural world in an artistic way. She’s seen how art and the outdoors can create safe moments of mindfulness and empower students to be expressive in varied ways.
She loves creating opportunities for students to recreate the beauty of the natural world through their own perspectives, as the world always seems more colorful through their eyes.
Jenne Hiigel
A fiber arts and textile crafter since her youth, she learned how to spin in 1994 from a mail order kit with typewritten instructions and a couple of illustrations. In the late 1990’s, she owned a fiber arts store in downtown San Luis Obispo, "Spin-knit," that focused primarily on spinning, weaving, knitting, and crochet.
As a patient, encouraging teacher, Jenne has taught several people the fiber arts crafts who insisted they had tried before and couldn’t learn. She says she can teach anyone the crafts, regardless of age or ability. A desire to learn is the essential element.
Our Guest Instructors
Ava Werner
Ava Werner is an artist and educator. Ava has been working in collage and mixed media for most of her career as an artist. As print slowly diminishes its impact in the world, using printed ephemera and collecting it has become a small obsession. The printed image also speaks to our shared history and the transitory nature of our reality. She has her MFA from Pratt Institute and a Masters of Education in Art Education from Columbia University in New York. She is a full-time Lecturer in the Art and Design Department at Cal-Poly in San Luis Obispo.
Ava’s work has been exhibited at The Shirley Project Space in Brooklyn, NY. She has participated in a number of residencies, some of the most influential has been the Scanz Conference residency in New Zealand in 2015. At this residency she had the privilege of spending time with the Maori at Parihaka in New Plymouth, NZ. During that residency, Ava and her partner Jim Werner created the Waterlinks Project, which is ongoing. Ava currently lives and works in the Central Coast of California and is very fortunate to see the Pacific ocean every day.
Camilla Auchterlounie
Camilla is a multi-faceted glass artist living and creating on the Central Coast. She runs a teaching studio in San Luis Obispo, where she guides others in the hands-on process of working with glass through different class formats. Camilla's glass art blends playful and modern design; she takes on custom commissions for both homes and public spaces.
When she is not in her studio, sharing her love for freedom and expression through design, you can find her showcasing her locally made art at various maker markets and craft events. You can learn more about Camilla and her work on her website: https://througheyesofglass.com
Greg "Johnny" Ellis
Greg, sometimes known as "Johnny", was born and raised in the prairies, mountains and forests of southern Wyoming, living for the last 23 years in equally stunning San Luis Obispo. Holding a degree in poetry writing from San Luis Obispo and an AA in Jazz studies, he spent the last couple decades working in leadership and fundraising roles with environmental nonprofits.
Greg is a self-taught artist in love with experimentation, spirit, and the evolving, reflective practice of making art. Some of his favorite creative channels include: watercolor birds, brush-tipped pen drawings, a turntable that combines tech and art to read colored records and output music, moon shelves with hidden doors, playing flute at sunrise on Cerro San Luis through a self-designed and built looping apparatus, a nest made of aspen saplings, a map of Big Sur, ink and watercolor bugs and flowers on 1800's envelopes and sheet music. You can see some of these and more atwww.instagram.com/gregjohne
Mary Strum
Mary Sturm enjoys sharing nature journaling with others. She especially enjoys helping new journalers who are nervous about drawing. She is the founder of the Central Coast Nature Journal Club, a community of people connecting with nature through nature journaling. Mary promotes nature journaling as whatever we want or need it to be.....scientific, meditative, or anything in between.
Mary has taught classes and developed curriculum for groups such as VIP (Volunteers In Parks), SLO Botanical Garden, Cal Poly, Land Conservancy and Camp KEEP.
Victoria Pond
As a multi disciplinary artist, Victoria’s path as a creator and educator is mirrored in the same multi faceted way. From working as a dance choreographer and set designer, to designing logos and art for local bands, zines, and businesses, to bringing ancestral craft to the youth of the Central Coast, all of her work is driven by a deep passion to communicate ideas on a soul resonant level. It is her highest priority to engage harmoniously with the earth and the beings on it, and to provide an experiences that touch us in the most human way. An artist’s path that is centered around discovery is fertile ground for growth, revealing an unseen and essential voice in the greatest body of artistic work: life. These are the founding principles that Victoria builds upon to cultivate a new generation of artists who are not only technically skilled, but create in a heart-forward way. Explore Victoria's art.
Kim Bethel
Kim is a fiber artist specializing in spinning and natural dyeing. Kim has been exploring and refining her fiber skills for over 50 years. She has been blessed to spend several decades on land in the Sierra foothills, where she enjoyed raising animals and harvesting the land for fiber materials and dyes. She is passionate about sharing her knowledge, wisdom, and experience to inspire others in exploring and enjoying the benefits of natural and homemade fiber arts. Kim is a naturalist, gardener and spinner of brilliant ideas!
Jay Stieler
I’m Jay Stieler, a Central Coast watercolor artist inspired by the
rugged coastline, rolling hills, and seaside towns of California’s
Central Coast. My contemporary watercolor paintings focus on local coastal landscapes, capturing the light, movement, and atmosphere of the Pacific Ocean through expressive brushwork, layered washes, and rich, earthy tones. I’m passionate about painting the places that make this region unique — from quiet beaches and bluff trails to working harbors and coastal vistas.
My studio, Coast Art House, offers watercolor workshops, local displays, and beginner-friendly painting and plein-air classes. Through step-by-step instruction and hands-on guidance, I help students build confidence with essential watercolor techniques while creating their own original artwork.
Ron Pippin
Ron is a San Luis Obispo–based commercial artist, event producer, creative guide, and lifelong learner working across mediums. In his 25th year as Shiny Object, Ron hosts virtual and in-person workshops and pop-up cultural events. He’s also co-parenting two teens and playing all-vinyl DJ sets across SLO County.
Ron works a one-to-one guide and group lead helping others find inspiration in their own lives. See Ron's work at shinyobjectstudios.com
Monet Davis
Monét Davis lives on the Central Coast with her 3 cats and ever-evolving organic medicine garden. She has been practicing traditional earth-relational crafts and herbal medicine for 20 years. She is a devotee to harmonious, artful living, and reconnecting to the ancient traditions of peoples who lived in harmony and reciprocity with the earth.
Emily Luchetta
Emily grew up on the Central Coast, with a lifelong passion for art. She spent her childhood exploring art through drawing, painting, and collage, as well as a love of the fiber arts instilled in her by her grandmother, and her intrinsic curious nature.
Emily has enjoyed working as an educator with children for the past 10 years. Her experience in Waldorf education further supported Emily's connection to the nurturing and developmentally meaningful roll of artistic endeavors. She is passionate about creating for the sake of the process, not the product, and hopes to instill a love of creating for the sake of creating in her community and class culture!
Cait Ides
Cait is an experienced art educator with a background in sociology and art history. She has been teaching art since 2013 and is passionate about helping students explore creativity in meaningful ways. Cait brings elements of both Reggio Emilia and Montessori philosophies into her teaching relationship.
Cait’s educational philosophy focuses on fostering curiosity, self-expression, and hands-on learning in an inclusive environment that encourages artistic confidence. She believes that art is a tool for both personal growth and connecting with the world around us.