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Get to know the Indigo Fire Faculty & Staff!

The Skeleton Crew
(Studio Managers and Techs)

Ned Levering

Owner

Ned's work is influenced by 20th century English and Japanese pottery. He enjoys glaze chemistry and building out the studio space. Outside of pottery Ned enjoys brush making, chess, woodworking, tinkering with machines and electronics, and Starcraft 2 (not a dead game). He lives in Arlington with his partner Alex, dog Lola, and two children.

Annie Morford

Belmont Studio Manager

Annie is from Columbus, Ohio and has been working in clay for eight years. She makes both functional and sculptural work focusing on soft places to land. In her free time she dabbles in block printing and paper cutting, and almost always has a true crime podcast playing in the background.

Rachel Greider

Weekend Manager

Rachel grew up in Ohio and moved to Watertown in 2022. She has been an artist her whole life, jumping around between mediums every couple years. She fell in love with wheel throwing in 2020. She is experimenting with underglaze and wax surface decorations. In addition to pottery, Rachel loves the outdoors, painting, and taking care of her many plants and pup Kenai.

Ariane Curtin-Bowen

Director of Programs

Ariane joined Indigo Fire as a weekend staff member in Jan, 2020. She has a BA from Bennington College where she concentrated in ceramics. Her clay practice leans heavily on surface decoration, for better or for worse. Ariane is inspired by undulation, childhood comics, her cat Jasper, and is currently searching for the perfect electric green.

Jared Hostutler

Watertown Studio Manager

Jared graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a BFA in Ceramics. He enjoys making work that is playful, whimsical, and functional. He is also fascinated with incorporating local materials into his practice. When not working at Indigo, he's experimenting with stained glass, and tending to his lizard, cat, and young pup Peach.

Diana Salcedo

Studio Tech

Diana graduated from MassArt with a BFA in Ceramics. She has a wide variety of creative interests that include tufting small rugs, crocheting, illustrating and painting funky tattoo flash. She joined us in 2023 and has quickly grown into a key studio figure. Diana manages the student aid program as well as studio decorating materials.

Lola at Grove st.jpg

Lola Levering

Canine Femme Fatale

Lola is a happy go lucky pup with a wonky smile - you'll find her wherever Ned is!

Teachers

Teachers

Zelda Mayer Zelda fell in love with clay in high school and continues to learn from the material each day. Her work focuses on functional, beautiful objects thrown on the wheel that often engage with historical craft traditions. Her practice explores clay’s unique behavior—balancing mastery with material resistance.	Doug Hansel Doug found clay in 1992 at SUNY College at Buffalo. Since then, he has spent thirty plus years practicing wheel throwing and firing at Mudflat Pottery School. Along with being a teacher there for many years, he is also a studio artist and is part of the technical team that helps out with the student work. Doug likes wheel throwing functional work that shows movement in each piece.	Adriana Sousa Adriana Sousa Estrella is a ceramist and educator who fell in love with clay while in graduate school, studying something entirely unrelated. Needless to say, it did not take her long to abandon her field and shift her focus to ceramics. She loves quiet textures, pots with a strong point-of-view and wood firing. When she’s not making or teaching ceramics, you’ll likely find her deep in the woods, trying to identify a fallen seed pod or wildflower.
Grace Doherty Grace (she/her) was introduced to pottery in high school, and her appreciation for clay deepened in college ceramics courses at UVM. Since graduating, she has gained experience in teaching pottery and primary school art, and has developed her recognizably squiggly personal style. Her favorite part about teaching ceramics is seeing students grasp the heart lessons of clay - flexibility, patience and mindfulness to name a few!	Talia Shabanian Talia's pottery journey started in her high school ceramics class. A decade later, she focuses on creating everyday homeware built to be used and loved. She believes in learning through repetition and finds joy in helping others build confidence on the wheel. Outside the studio, Talia is a middle school teacher and brings her teaching instincts into her pottery practice.	Nicole Ginzburg Nicole first fell in love with clay while pursuing an industrial design degree at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She most enjoys the modular, slow, and thoughtful process of handbuilding her pottery, and aims to create moments in the clay that reflect her journey in the making process.
Joe Campo As an engineer, Joe relates to working with clay through the physics and chemistry of the material. He loves to bring the math of 3d shapes into his class lectures. Joe has been active in pottery studios as a studio manager, work exchange member, and throwing instructor over the last ten years, always enjoying guiding students to new materials or techniques that they may not have tried before. Joe’s ideal pot has a few rough edges, a few finger prints, and feels unconsciously satisfying to use.	Janet O'Malley A potter for over three decades, Janet has been molding, shaping and weaving her unique narrative into the essence of her creations, stopping along the way when life got busy, but always returning with unwavering passion. In her home-based studio, she uses stoneware and porcelain to create pieces which she sells in local stores, online and at events. Janet studied both at the Harvard Ceramics Studio and Mudville in Somerville.	Julie Peck Julie Peck has had a home studio in Somerville since finishing her MFA at U Mass-Dartmouth's Program in Artisanry. Her work is all handbuilt with thick slabs and coils and then carved. She balances her time between her studio, teaching and working as a MCC STARS artist-in-residence at several local schools. Learn more at JuliePeckCeramics.com
June Lee June Lee (she/her/hers) was born in Hong Kong and moved to the U.S. when she was 17. At age 18 she was introduced to ceramics at Wellesley High School. June is currently a studio artist and faculty member at Mudflat Pottery School. June is passionate about making her students (at any age!) fall in love with clay and she is skillful in teaching beginning wheel throwing while incorporating handbuilding and decorating tips. June's work has been known as "happy pottery" that makes people smile.	Taylor Byrne Taylor graduated from the University of Connecticut with a BFA in photography. While studying there, she was introduced to pottery and she hasn’t stopped throwing since. In addition to being a potter, Taylor has been teaching art at the high school level in public schools for the past 7 years. She is currently a Ceramics teacher at Somerville High School. Taylor is drawn to throwing on the pottery wheel because it brings moments of silence and creativity to an otherwise hectic life as a teacher	Kimberly Wutkiewicz Kim first fell in love with pottery 20 years ago when a friend taught her how to use a kick wheel at summer camp. Since then, she has seized every opportunity to get her hands into clay. She loves exploring simple, graceful forms and incorporating her love of nature into sgraffito and other surface design techniques. Kim joined Indigo Fire in 2021 after teaching wheel-throwing at Mudville Pottery for four years.
Sarah Carroll Sarah has worked with clay since studying full time at the School for Professional Crafts at the Worcester Center for Crafts 20 years ago. There she learned everything from wheel throwing and hand building to glaze preparation and firing all different types of kilns. She is drawn to the moments and materials on display when nature meets the human-constructed environment such as rust, weathered paint, and discarded bricks. Sarah has been throwing at Indigo Fire since 2019.	Marc Mancuso Marc is a maker, teacher, and thinker who likes minutae, processes, and materials. He has taught ceramics to learners of all ages in the Boston area since 1998. He has worked professionally, exhibited, and lectured, locally and internationally. He draws hundreds of patterns, and occasionally finds time to work with enamels, glass, fabric, and paper. He is totally engaged with the way humor and curiosity influence fine art, design, and even engineering.	Sara Jacobsen As a child, Sara loved to draw. By her teens, that love had evolved into linoleum carving and print-making. Some 40 years later Sara is delighted to find that the sgraffito process of scratching through a layer of colored slip or underglaze to expose the clay surface beneath beautifully brings together her two childhood artistic pleasures; and the 3-dimensional clay forms add to the fun challenge of working in-the-round.
Robert Boyer Robert Boyer has been working in clay for over fifteen years, making on the wheel and exploring a variety of hand building techniques. He has previously taught both wheel throwing and hand building classes at MIT’s Student Art Association. His inspirations typically come from highly repetitive patterns in nature and leverage his background in the sciences looking to atomic structure and algorithmic thought processes as often as wood grain and feathers.

Weekend Staff

Weekend Staff

Sal deBethune Sal graduated from Lesley University School of Art and Design with a BFA in Fine Arts. She specializes in various mediums of painting and ceramics, including handbuilding and wheel throwing. She has also experimented with 3D clay printing. During the summer, Sal has lead the pottery program at Camp Wawenock, a sleep away camp in Maine for 6 years. She is currently participating in the Technical Training Program at the Ceramics Program, at the Office for the Arts at Harvard.	Cat Diaz Caterina is from Boston, MA. She grew up an avid painter and found pottery a couple years ago. She enjoys working with imagery and surface techniques. Caterina teaches children’s classes and tinkers with her own kiln in the Waltham area.	Ace Harrill Ace Harrill is an experimental functional potter with a background in animation. He's passionate about inclusive storytelling, building community through art, and picking up a random hobby every few weeks (right now, it's visible mending). He's happiest pugging clay and listening to nonfiction audiobooks through Libby, or hearing about other people's latest artistic endeavours. Ace works on Sundays in Watertown.

Work Exchange

Work Exchange

Cindy Dill Cindy is our work exchange on Fridays in Belmont.	Larisa Ovalles Larisa Ovalles is an architect and urban designer whose pottery work, Los Objetos, grows from her work in climate resilience and her fascination with landscapes, geology, materials, and geographies as they change over time. She has been taking classes and an independent study member at the Watertown studio since 2021, and she will be now working Tuesday nights.	Jacque Li Jacque first started pottery in 2021, taking a short break before joining Watertown's classes in 2024. As someone who can be a perfectionist and somewhat impatient, clay has taught (forced?) her to slow down and let things happen when they're ready to happen. Outside the studio she likes to be outside amongst the green things and dogs, and has a habit of rotating through multiple other crafts at the same time (currently, mostly knitting).
El Helai El is thrilled to be the new Monday night work exchange in Watertown. Her love of clay began in high school, but it wasn’t until 2020—eleven years after graduating—that she found her way back to the wheel. El is drawn to functional forms that bring warmth and a sense of home to everyday life, and lately, she’s been playing with ceramic-base lamps. When she’s not in the studio, you’ll likely find her in the garden, sketching under a tree, or painting.	Jenna Valerius Jenna spent practically all her weekends during high school at the Belmont studio, working and making. Now, after completing her BFA in Animation at MassArt, she decided to return to Indigo Fire following some loving nagging from her best friend. She is stoked to be back, to have a place to get messy and to return to the creative playground ceramics provides.	Olivia Angood-Hardy Olivia is our Friday night work exchange in Belmont and also does independent study at the Watertown studio. She started taking classes at Indigo Fire in 2019 and quickly fell in love with ceramics. She likes to make functional pieces and is always on a mission to make the coziest mugs. Outside of the studio, Olivia works as a social worker and loves exploring outside, reading, running, being a helicopter cat and plant parent, and spending time with friends.
Ido Dinnar Ido began working with clay in high school and has been deeply involved in ceramics ever since. He led the Brandeis Pottery Club as president and has taught workshops at Indigo Fire for over three years. He is our Wednesday work ex in Belmont. His focus is on functional ceramics, with an interest in form, utility, and the tactile connection between maker and material. Ido currently works in biotech and enjoys the balance of science, creativity, and community that ceramics brings to his life.	Annie Thompson Annie took her first pottery class in college. She continued to work with clay through graduate school as a form of meditation and outlet for stress. After more than a decade away, she returned to the studio and her fondness for working with clay was immediately reignited. Annie teaches pottery classes at Munroe Center for the Arts in Lexington. Outside of the studio she conducts research and lectures at MIT.	Jenna Gross Jenna started taking pottery classes at the Watertown studio in 2021 and now works on Wednesday nights there. Jenna is all consumed by crafts! Besides making whimsical ceramics, they knit, spin yarn, sew, and make linocut prints. When Jenna is not crafting you can find her in modern dance productions through the Greater Boston area. When you see Jenna please show her a picture of your pet!
Adam Clemens Adam started taking pottery classes at the studio in 2021 and now helps at the Belmont studio as a glaze technician assistant. He enjoys experimenting with surface designs and glaze applications. You can find Adam biking around Cambridge/Somerville, otherwise he’s probably baking or knitting or hanging out with his cat.	Jocelyn Rogers Jocelyn first started pottery in college and after several years off, she came to a sip n’ spin and rediscovered her love of throwing. Outside of the studio, she works as an occupational therapist in child & adolescent behavioral health where she calms the chaos through creative play.	Kate Dunlevy Kate is our Tuesday evening work exchange in Belmont. While attending SMFA for art therapy with a concentration of ceramics in 2009, Kate found a love for creating and getting her hands dirty. After a 10 year hiatus, she joined Indigo Fire. Kate evolved into a work exchange role and teaches Sunday morning workshops. You can find Kate at the studio creating functional pieces intended to hold moments, alongside her friendly black lab, Ellie.
Rachel Nathan Rachel is a full-time mom and a part-time artist. Her first love is fiber art and all things involving yarn. She spins, weaves, knits, and crochets. She has been doing ceramics for about four years, and thinks art is more important than cleaning except when she is doing her work exchange in the studio.

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