Class Instructors

Bowie Croisant

Bowie Croisant’s earliest appreciation for form and function is the farm machinery he remembers seeing while growing up in rural southeast Kansas. The edges and planes of his geometric forms are intended for a soda firing's coats of color. He uses Computer Aided Drafting, or CAD software, to design forms for slip cast components that are assembled to shape his sculpture and functional ware. Croisant received a BFA from Kansas State University in ceramics and spent a year the Kansas City Art Institute as a special status student. His work is in multiple public and private collections including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. Croisant is an artist in residence at Red Star Studios.

Calder Kamin

Calder Kamin is an artist and gallery administrator in Kansas City, MO. Kamin’s fabricated fauna illustrate an investigation into our benevolence for certain species, and cultural constructions of nature. Before completing her BFA, for ceramics and art history from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2009, she began curating for Red Star Studios, and the Kansas City Art Institute’s Ferguson Teaching Collection and off campus galleries. Red Star Studios exhibits Kamin’s work and supports her studio. She has shown nationally, and is in several notable collections in Kansas City.

Stephanie Kantor

Stephanie Kantor is both a functional potter and a painter. Working in these media allows Kantor to translate her ideas onto different surfaces and explore materiality.  She is inspired by urban landscapes and their decay.  This motif is emphasized by color and pattern on low fire red clay. Kantor graduated from Penn State in 2009 with a BFA in Ceramics and a BS in Art Education. Kantor has been resident at Red Star Studios since 2009.

Tommy Frank

Tommy Frank was born and raised in Florida.  He spent a lot of his younger years in the woods, camping and backpacking around central Florida. He was awarded the Eagle Scout Award when he was 16.  Since then he has always enjoyed traveling and the outdoors.  He attended Asbury College, a small liberal arts college southwest of Lexington, KY.  After graduating he moved back to Tampa to be a studio assistant for local potters.  He then became the first Artist-in-Residence (AIR) of the St. Petersburg Clay Company in 2002. Here he was able to experiment in atmospheric firings and gained exponential growth in both technical and aesthetic decisions.  Following the end of his residency, he was awarded a summer resident position at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT.  The short summer residency deeply impacted his life, challenging his views of manhood and growing up.  After coming back from Montana he took another residency position at the Odyssey Center for the Ceramic Arts in Asheville, NC. Asheville would prove to be fertile ground for inspiration and contemplation on his thesis.  However, he decided to enter a more academic setting by enrolling in the ceramics post-baccalaureate program at the University of Florida.  Tommy accepted a graduate assistantship at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.  He completed his Master of Fine Arts thesis in the spring of 2010.  After graduation, Tommy was the 3D Studio Technician at the University of St Francis in Fort Wayne, IN.  He is currently the Studio Manager for Red Star Studios in Kansas City, Missouri.

Michael Baxley

Michael is a Missouri native whose history with Red Star Studios dates back to 1998 when he was one of Red Star's original private studio members. Since his time at Red Star, he studied Art and Art History at Johnson County Community College and Avila University. Baxley has been a professional artist since 2001 with work in both national and international collections including the Mandarin Hotel in Miami and The Kentucky Museum of Craft. He currently works out of his studio in Kansas City's West Bottoms and lives in Overland Park with his wife and two children. Michael is excited to be back at Red Star in his new role.