Born in a displaced persons camp in Salzburg, Austria in 1947, my family immigrated first to Canada and finally to New York in 1956. I attended City College of New York and studied dance at The Henry Street Playhouse with Alwin Nikolais and weaving at The Art Students League. In 1967 I moved to Boston and continued my weaving studies with Gretchen Mueller at The Weaver's Trade in Cambridge. I received a scholarship to Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and studied with Ted Hallman. In 1968 I taught weaving and off-loom techniques at the Vershire School in Vermont.
In 1969 my husband, Nahum Stiskin, and I moved to Japan. I continued pursuing my interest in weaving and Japanese fiber arts and also studied Tea Ceremony at The Urasenke School of Tea in Kyoto. In 1970 my husband and I founded a publishing company in Kyoto called Autumn Press. My domain in the company was art director, book designer and director of production. We published books about Asia, nutrition, environment and poetry. Some of our best selling titles were: The Book of Tofu, which introduced Tofu to the west, Ann Marie Colbin's The Book of Whole Meals, Of Separateness and Merging, a collection of poetry by Ellen Bass, and Dr. Helen Caldicott's ground breaking manifesto for the anti-nuclear movement, Nuclear Madness. After seven years, we returned to Boston with our two children.
Continuing my work as an art director, book designer and weaver, from 1980 to 1982 I worked as a designer/ art director for Illuminations, a graphic arts publishing company in Cambridge, Mass. Longing to focus on my own work and creativity, I studied papermaking with Joe Zina of Rugg Road Papers at Bennington College in Vermont. I have also studied with Bernard Toale and Elaine Koretsky. I have been a papermaker, specializing in 'pulp painting' for twenty-five years. In 1987, I co-curated a regional survey of Handmade paper artists at the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Mass. I am one of the founding artists of the Brickbottom Artists Buildings in Somerville, Mass. My work in Handmade paper is in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and corporations. In 2011 I moved my studio to the Boston Center for the Arts and my artwork is now focused on Fabric Collage, Commissioned artwork and Public Art Installations.
I am currently working on a Holocaust memoire of my mother titled Remnants: One Family's Experience of the Holocaust. Attending the annual writer's workshops, and the support of the staff and instructors at The Joiner Institute For The Study Of War And It's Social Consequences at UMass, Boston has been pivotal in my ability to consolidate the mass of documents, letters, photographs and anecdotes of my family's history.
My interest in healing and movement led me to study the Alexander Technique and in 1989 I received my certificate as a teacher. I am a Certified Reiki Master (2012) and volunteer at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
