Women’s Intergenerational Symposium Biographical Information
Meet your Hosts, Speakers and the Artists:
Aimee Sones, Event Coordinator and Co-Host
Aimee Sones was born and raised in southern California.
She loves to travel and has lived all over the United States, worked and lived in India and the UAE. Aimee holds an MFA from The Ohio State University and has given demonstrations and exhibited in the US, Bulgaria, England, Germany, India and the UAE. She has received numerous scholarships, awards and several Greater Columbus Arts Council Grants.
Aimee enjoys working with students of all ages and has taught at institutions including California State University, Fullerton, the National School of Applied Arts “St. Luca,” Sofia, Bulgaria and the Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington.
Over the past decade, Aimee has also worked behind the scenes on a variety of projects including managing day to day tasks, educational planning and implementing strategic systems for the success of organizations such as Glass Axis, The Torch Foundation, Pilchuck Glass School, and the Los Angeles Glass Center.
Aimee currently lives in southern California, where she teaches, creates and assists organizations, other creatives and entrepreneurs in reaching their next level.
Keri Ingvarsson, Co-Host
Keri Ingvarsson is a career entrepreneur who grew up in New York, fascinated by real estate and believing every building holds a legacy and a story. After a 20-year career in marketing and public relations, spanning from radio and TV to fashion and film, Keri ultimately chose to work in real estate because people are her true passion.
Whether representing a new couple starting a life together or a foreign investor who wants to claim a piece of Hollywood, she believes every human has a story and every story has a home.
Keri’s career has taken her from NYC to Paris, Riga, Beijing, and many places in between. She had the opportunity to call Stockholm, Brooklyn, and Manhattan her home prior to moving to Los Angeles in 2013 with her husband and five children. She lived in Silverlake, Loz Feliz, and Toluca Lake before settling in Glenoaks Canyon in 2018. Keri loves exploring the area and garnering an in-depth knowledge of the many communities, landscapes, and schools that make this one of the greatest places to live. In her life, nothing is better than getting to know great people, hearing their stories, and finding their perfect match of a home.
Keri is a graduate of Fordham University and holds graduate and post-graduate degrees from New School University and Columbia University, respectively. In her community, she is an active volunteer with the Glendale YWCA, Glenoaks Elementary PTA, and is currently the President of the Walter Reed Middle School PTSA in Studio City.
Chef Manouschka Guerrier, Celebrity Chef
Manouschka is a former model who went on to become one of Hollywood’s premiere celebrity chefs. Manouschka learned all she knows about cooking from her mother, Jacqueline, and from her professionally trained Haitian grandmother, Olga. Best described as the “Carrie Bradshaw” of cooking, she brings fashion and personality to food, and is equally as at home in her Louboutins as she is in her apron and cooking mits!
She has starred in the Food Network's PRIVATE CHEFS OF BEVERLY HILLS & KITCHEN INFERNO. NBC’s FOOD FIGHTERS. RECIPE HUNTERS. With appearances on KTLA MORNING NEWS as a Lifestyle Expert. OWN’s MY OWN TIME & HOME MADE SIMPLE, E!’s GIULIANA AND BILL, Hallmark Channel's HOME & FAMILY, YouTube's REESE'S REMIX and worked as the food stylist for TV GUIDE’s HOLLYWOOD GIRLS NIGHT making all the food for Allison Sweeney & Ali Landry’s weekly Hollywood girl’s night dinner parties.
Cheryl Saban-Sponsor
At the heart of Saban Glass, is Cheryl. A woman who wears many hats: author, philanthropist, psychologist, musician, designer, social activist for gender equality and #hotshopmama. Today, however, you will likely find her with a blowpipe in her hand, a bowl of colorful frit by her side and a 2100 degree furnace supporting her efforts.
Her creative spirit flows like molten glass and can be seen in her resulting hand blown creations. She is color. Both inside and out. And believes in spreading that color to the world – through her functional art, as well as through her tireless charitable endeavors.
As for those hats… well, she is the President of the Saban Family Foundation, founder of the Cheryl Saban Self-Worth Foundation for Women and Girls and a former senior advisor to the United States Mission to the United Nations… just to name a few. And of course, glassblower. Or as we like to call her, the #hotshopmama. Saban Glass is just one more way in which Cheryl can continue to bring more color to more people in the world.
Amanda McDonald Stern, All Female All Star Team Lead
Born in 1980 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Amanda studied painting at SUNY Purchase and later went on to receive her BFA in sculpture from Jacksonville University. She has studied glass and sculpture at Pratt Fine Arts Center, Pilchuck Glass School, Corning Museum of Glass, Pittsburgh Glass Center, and the University of Miami. Her career in the arts and manufacturing across mediums has moved her to various locations within the United States and has lead to her immense interest in how we relate to material objects, to our surrounding environments and to one another. She explores her interest in relationships through the assemblage of multiple parts, color and line.
Amanda currently lives in Los Angeles, CA.
The All Female All Star Team includes:
Linda DIEc
Linda T. Diec is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, educator and arts administrator. She received an M.F.A. degree in 2013 from the Columbus College of Art & Design and a B.F.A. in Art (Glass) from The Ohio State University in 2007 where she also studied art history, architectural design and biochemistry. Through her artwork, she translates and attempts to homogenize and satirize of the many faceted systems, idioms and ideologies of the everyday. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California finding beauty and inspiration in the immense cultural ironies surrounding her.
Lisa Piaskowy
Lisa Piaskowy is the founder of Studio Vesce ('vesce' from effervesce), a Los Angeles based manufacturer of functional and decorative glassware. Before moving to LA, she was a factory glass worker in Seattle and a studio team-member for Northwest fine artists. Lisa is a Chicago native and graduate of Illinois State University where she started working in glass in 2005. Her professional projects have taken her to workshops and museums all over the US, and she was invited to work on a collaboration in Murano, Italy.
Danielle Brensinger
Throughout her artistic career, Danielle Brensinger has explored her voice through various techniques involving glass and mixed media. After receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Glass from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2012, she immediately became immersed in the world of glass lighting and production. Danielle previously lived in Brooklyn, New York where she worked as a freelance glassblower, artist assistant and educator out of UrbanGlass. Brensinger also taught as an adjunct professor at Salem Community College in New Jersey. She has received full scholarships from the Celebrity Fund and the Tommie Rush and Richard Jolley Scholarship Fund to attend classes at the Corning Museum of Glass and the Penland School of Crafts. Danielle has also been able to attend Pilchuck Glass School and the Bild-Werk Academy in Frauenau, Germany as a teaching assistant for both glass blowing and bronze casting classes. Currently living in Los Angeles, California, Danielle continues to work as a freelance glassblower and fabricates work for lighting and interior designers.
Kate Buttino
Kate Buttino studied Glass with a Concentration in Industrial Design at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston Mass. From the early days of her Glassblowing career she worked a local Glassblowing studio; Almost Perfect Glass in Cambridge, Mass. During the week days, she would work production in a 3 man product team for Glass Artist Andrew Ianniazzi. At night and weekends, Kate was an instructor for beginner and intermediate classes and workshops at NOCA Glass School run by Glass Artist Amanda Gundy. Summer of 2019 Kate shipped off to Lincoln City, Oregon to work at Lincoln City Glass Center for Glass Artist Kelly Howard. There, she would work one on one with customers to create a selected item from the Glass Product Menu provided, called “Blow Your Own.” After the summer season slowed down, Kate made her most recent move to Long Beach, California and started working at KT Glassworks operated by Glass Artist Kazuki Takizawa where Kate will teach classes, private lessons, and assist Kazuki and other Artists who rent the studio. Aside from Glassblowing, Kate trains and coaches the kids program in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at ATOS Jiu Jitsu League in Long Beach, CA. She's an avid Herbalist and has started a line of Herbal Healing Salves from the herbs and plants she grows in her garden. Her line will be launching at BYO Long Beach in their downtown location early March.
Aya Oki
Aya Oki is a Japanese artist based in San Bernardino, California.
Blown glass is a means for her to fully express the charm of the glass that she wants to convey. She controls the materiality of glass and uses her personal process to share her passion often drawing attention to the puffy, squishy, stretchy and otherwise life-like qualities of the material.
Aya completed her undergraduate and master’s degree in glass at the Aichi University of Education, Japan in 2008 and earned her MFA at Rochester Institute of Technology in 2014. Since then, she has been traveling the world as an artist and an educator. Aya has taught at Pilchuck Glass School, Penland School of Crafts and universities both in and out of the country. Her most recent residencies were at the Corning Museum of Glass and Tacoma Museum of Glass, both of which have had a significant impact and have allowed her to continue to develop her most current work, the Fate series.
Nicole Stahl
Born in Dayton, Ohio, Nicole Stahl utilizes primarly cast glass work to depict objects that reference dreams and memories. Stahl graduated from Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio in 2010 with a bachelor of fine arts in Glass and bachelor of art in Art Education. She is currently the 3D Visual Arts teacher at Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City, California, where she creates work alongside her adored students.
Stahl was awarded the Dr. Jerrold Bellitz fully supported scholarship at the Penland School of Craft in 2014, was a Sam and Beverly Maloof Scholarship recipient, and awarded an Office of Student Research grant both through California State in 2015.
Stahl has shown her work in exhibitions across the country including in such venues as the Foundry Art Centre in St. Charles, Missouri, Circle Six Studios in Phoenix, Arizona and Flame Run Gallery, in Louisville Kentucky.
The event has been made free and is generously sponsored by Cheryl Saban of Saban Glassware and GenART.
