About Us
The IAMA team is a diverse group of passionate and dedicated artists, teachers, creative thinkers and social justice advocates working towards a common goal. We are a team who values collaboration, racial and gender equity, youth empowerment and love at its core.
Scroll Down to see our talented team and our amazing board members
Mission
IAMA Provides technical and professional development for under-represented youth through hands on learning in the industrial arts.
IAMA Team
Carla Hall (she/her) - Founder, Executive Director, and Mentor
Carla Hall is a professional metalworker and arts educator. Her utilitarian work merges Japanese and Arts and Crafts style with creative joinery and visible connections. She enjoys designing and building architectural and garden structures, furniture and sculpture. Her work has been commissioned by architects, interior and landscape designers and many individuals throughout the United States.
Carla has a deep commitment to the education of metalworking, especially to communities who are underrepresented. She has taught workshops at various
institutions throughout the country as well as in her own studio. She served as the Youth Program Director at The Crucible for 17 years and was awarded the Jefferson Award for outstanding community service and leadership for her work in youth
industrial arts education. She currently lives in the northland of Minneapolis. She spends her time forging steel, trail biking, exploring the upper Midwest and hanging out with her wife and two young children.
Dani Sanchez (she/they) - Studio Assistant & Teacher Assistant
Dani´s gateway to sculpture spawned from an obsession with spoons while living in a remote village outside of Glacier National Park. To create these forms, she would sculpt them out of wood using an array of power tools located in the wood shop which doubled as a gift shop attached to her home and connected via a little hobbit tunnel. She began to teach power-carving classes out of the shop and other community spaces and decided, to become a more well-rounded educator, to move to Northern Minnesota for an immersive craft education program at North House Folk School. There, Dani was exposed to a wide breadth of traditional crafts, many of which, she discovered, are reliant on metal tools. After learning how to use a coal forge, she became hooked on blacksmithing, and delighted in making sculptural tools to complement her other craft practices. Dani loves metal as a medium for self-expression and is excited to see what IAMA students will make!
Jhyle Rinker (she/her)- Curator
Jhyle Rinker is a curator, contemporary jewelry artist and the gallery coordinator for the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center. In her curatorial practice she attempts to stretch the boundaries of the art gallery norm. Her goal is to give space to see art from different perspectives and she seeks ways to make it accessible and open to every person, providing both the artist(s) and the viewer a safe space to connect to art and those that make it. Jhyle also believes strongly that we are always learning and each show curated is a new story to learn and grow from. Similarly, in her jewelry practice, she is always open to new experiences, techniques and forever seeks knowledge on how to create works as environmentally sound as possible. She enjoys the process of taking trash and making it a wearable piece of artwork.
Megan Bates (she/her)- Writing and Development
Megan Bates is an arts writer, fundraiser, and advocate for LGBTQIA+ youth. She grew up helping out in her mother's metal casting foundry in Northern California.
IAMA Board
Kristy Higares (she/her)- President and Treasurer
Kristy Higares is an educator, writer, and arts administrator who’s worked for over twenty years serving schools and communities in Oakland. She’s inspired by the intersection of arts, education, community, and impact. Her passion and vision have been motivated by her work with Bay Area teens at The Crucible, an industrial art school in West Oakland, where she worked for twelve years. Kristy enjoys working with her fellow artists, educators, and activists, to bring relevant and innovative new programs to the greater Bay Area.
David Clifford (he/him)- Secretary
David Clifford is an educator, craftsman, & catalyst for people’s creative courage. He builds learning environments of belonging to inspire our humanity by utilizing tensions found between academia & the arts, white supremacy & human dignity. David has been a metal artist, designer, builder, shop teacher, and equity/social justice-oriented educator for over 25 years. As a benevolent edu-agitator David has co-founded the East Bay School for Boys as a feminist act to redesign men, founded Design School X (DSX), co-created Liberatory Design, and most recently/radically, RdWDC.
Jess Knight (she/her)
Jess has been exploring art her entire life and was introduced to the cast metal process as a teenager. She serves as the Resource Coordinator at the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center (CAFAC) and has been instructing and creating art objects professionally for the past decade following completion of degrees in both Studio Arts (Summa Cum Laude) and Art History from the University of Minnesota. Jess also delights in bringing arts engagement opportunities to interesting and unusual places using her bicycle and trailer transported arts engagement tools collectively called Pedal to the Metal:
Mobile Workshop.
CJ Mace (she/ they)
CJ Mace is the Welding and Metal Fabrication Instructor at RTech, Minneapolis Public Schools’ new CTE Center that shuttles students from all the district high schools to take focused tech ed classes. She runs a grant-funded program called Crew OUT!, which brings craftspeople and industry folks into the shop and students out to area partners to do real world, industry level projects. She’s been teaching STEAM-focused high school for 7 years, including Construction/Woodworking, Fabrication Design, Manufacturing Design and Development and Small Engines. Before teaching high school, she apprenticed as a millwright (precision industrial mechanic), was a working artist and taught college and studio printmaking and letterpress in Chicago before moving back to MN. She lives in South Minneapolis with her wife, her wife’s 17 year old, their soon-to-be baby and a menagerie of animals.
anvil photo image by fxquadro on Freepik
two friends youth photo by ___ on Freepik
youth with rainbow flag photo by ___ on Freepik
woman welder photo by ___ on Freepik