2025 PROGRAM GUIDE AND PRESENTERS
NCECA’s 59th Annual Conference, Formation, in Salt Lake City, Utah,
March 26-29, 2025.

2025 NCECA Conference Demonstrating Artist, Kyungmin Park

Register today for NCECA’s 59th Annual Conference, Formation, Salt Lake City, Utah,
March 26-29, 2025.

Click to download the 2025 NCECA Program Guide, Exhibition Listings, and Conference Posters PDFs!

Download a 2025 Program Guide PDF

Download a 2025 Exhibition Listings Information PDF

At NCECA, we're committed to fostering awareness about sustainable ceramic practices and their impact on the global environment. In 2025, we are taking proactive steps to reduce our carbon footprint, focusing on green membership and sustainable conference practices.

This year, we are excited to offer pre-publication ordering to help minimize paper waste. In an effort to reduce our environmental impact, a limited amount of copies of conference publications will be printed for in-person attendees. We encourage you to pre-order your publications in advance to ensure you receive your copy while supporting our sustainability goals.

Please place your pre-order to reserve your publication. This year, we are offering a free digital download for NCECA’s 2025 conference poster as part of our green practices/

Click below to download a free printable PDF version of the conference poster:

Free Download PDF Conference Poster (11" x 17”)

Free Download PDF Conference Poster (18” x 24")

2025 NCECA Demonstrating Artists
Kyungmin Park and Diego Valles

THURSDAY, MARCH 27, 2025 and FRIDAY, MARCH 28, 2025
Grand Ballroom A–H | 9:00AM–12:00PM

Mata Ortiz Pottery Techniques by Diego Valles
Diego Valles

Valles will demonstrate the main steps to creating a Mata Ortiz vessel by creating pots with natural-occurring clays using coils, burnishing bone-dry pieces, and decorating the surfaces using his slips with human hair brushes, adding his personal touches to the traditional techniques.

Sculpting Narratives: Figurative Storytelling
Kyungmin Park

In this demonstration, Park will explore how figurative ceramic sculptures powerfully convey personal and shared experiences. Handbuilding techniques such as slab construction and coiling will be demonstrated to create basic forms, with a focus on developing expressive facial features and body gestures for detailed work.

Kyungmin Park
2025 NCECA Demonstrating Artist

Kyungmin Park is a South Korean-born ceramic artist whose figurative sculptures explore introspection, diversity, and human connections. She has received fellowship awards from the Windgate Foundation and the Matsutani International Foundation and was a 2016 NCECA Emerging Artist. Park is currently an Associate Professor at Endicott College and has conducted over 40 workshops and lectures at various art institutions. She currently lives and teaches in Boston, Massachusetts.

Diego Valles
2025 NCECA Demonstrating Artist

Diego Valles is a potter from Mata Ortiz in Chihuahua, Mexico. Ever since he was a child, he has enjoyed working with clay because it allows him to connect with nature. Now, he realizes that it also helps him connect with his artistic and cultural roots, his fellow potters, and the world.

2025 NCECA Opening Keynote Presenters
Suleika Jaouad and Kim Dickey

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 2025
Grand Ballroom A–H | 7:00PM–8:00PM

KEYNOTE: Creativity as a Lifeline: Art, Writing, and Resilience with Suleika Jaouad

Join artist, activist, and New York Times bestselling author Suleika Jaouad with celebrated artist and professor, Kim Dickey, for an intimate conversation as they explore the intersection of art, writing, and health. Discover how creative practices can foster resilience, navigate illness, and offer profound healing, while connecting deeply with the human experience.

Suleika Jaouad (Image: Nadia Albano)

Suleika Jaouad (pronounced Su-lake-uh Ja-wad) is the author of the instant New York Times bestselling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms.
She wrote the Emmy Award-winning New York Times column “Life, Interrupted” and her reported features and essays have appeared in TheNew York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Vogue, and NPR, among other publications. A highly sought-after speaker, her mainstage TED Talk was one of the ten most popular of 2019 and has nearly five million views. She is also the creator of the Isolation Journals, a community creativity project founded during the Covid-19 pandemic to help others convert isolation into artistic solitude; over 100,000 people from around the world have joined.

Born in New York City to a Tunisian father and a Swiss mother, Suleika attended The Juilliard School's pre-college program for the double bass, and earned her BA with highest honors from Princeton University and an MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College.

Suleika’s career aspirations as a foreign correspondent were cut short when, at age 22, she was diagnosed with leukemia.

She began writing her New York Times column “Life, Interrupted” from her hospital room at Sloan-Kettering, and has since become a fierce advocate for those living with illness and enduring life’s many other interruptions.

Suleika served on Barack Obama's Presidential Cancer Panel, the national advisory board of Family Reach and the Bone Marrow and Cancer Foundation, and the Brooklyn Public Library’s Arts & Letters Committee. She was awarded the Red Door Advocacy & Community Service Award, and has been an artist in residence at Ucross, ArtYard, and the Kerouac Project.

Suleika travels the world teaching workshops and speaking, and she was an Anacapa Scholar in Residence at the Thacher School and a lecturer in the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University. She has appeared on the Today Show, NPR's Talk of the Nation, the Paris Review, the Los Angeles Times and Glamour, among others.

2025 NCECA Opening Keynote Presenters
Kim Dickey

Kim Dickey

Kim Dickey examines the meaningfulness of the decorative, both in terms of how it is used to signify the role an object must play in the world, and in the way a dismissal of the decorative came to exclude any number of voices from the art world. Working with a variety of media, she makes objects and installations that set the stage upon which various artistic traditions can “speak” directly to one another to foster a closer conversation.

Dickey has had solo shows in New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Aspen and Denver, in galleries and museums across the country and globe. Dickey’s work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Everson Museum, Syracuse; Museum of Contemporary Art, Honolulu; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, which featured her mid-career retrospective in 2016. Recent commissions at hospitals, including the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC, has inspired her long-held belief that art can promote healing.

2025 NCECA Closing Keynote Presenter
Sana Musasama

Sana Musasama (Image: Grace Roselli)

SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 2025
Grand Ballroom A–H | 11:30AM–12:30PM

CLOSING LECTURE: The Chapters In My Journey with
Sana Musasama

Musasama will explore her artistic journey through the chapters of her career: Exploration, Study, Travel, Time Creating, Humanity, Girls, Employment, Activism, and Returning to Ourselves and Joy.

Sana Musasama is a clay artist, humanitarian, and global trotter. Musasama’s work and passions center on the lives of little girls who were, and still are, her mentors as she traveled the world. Clay is Musasama’s primary material using the sculptural language, in addition to mixed media materials, like cloth, dirt, glass, etc. At the age of 73, she has found herself returning to prior series, such as the House series, which she created prior to any art school training.