Outreach & Communications Director: Claire Brassil
cbrassil@watershedceramics.org
Claire directs Watershed’s marketing and messaging, photographs artists at work, and designs digital and print collateral. Additionally, she works with artists to organize Watershed’s residency sessions, workshops, and exhibitions.
Before joining the Watershed staff, Claire created the art program and served as lead art teacher at Girls Prep, the first New York City charter school for girls. Additionally, Claire worked as the studio manager for the Supporting Women Artists Project (SWAP) artist collective in Brooklyn, NY, managed a gallery that showed work by emerging international artists, and collaborated with a pioneering art lawyer on projects for Christie’s, the World Monuments Fund, Alliance for the Arts, One Laptop Per Child, and a number of private clients. Claire earned an A.B. in Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies from Vassar College and an M.F.A. in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Additionally, she has taken part in residencies at Vermont Studio Center, the Lerman Trust in Laceyville, Pennsylvania, and Kloster Bentlage in Rheine, Germany, and has exhibited work nationally and internationally.
Courtney assists with major gifts and the capital campaign, helps strategize fundraising efforts, and manages gift processing and the donor database. She has been working in the non-profit arts sector for more than fifteen years. With experience ranging from studio manager for the art department at Bowdoin College, to development and fundraising for MacDowell, the country’s oldest artist residency, she has always worked to support artists and the creation of new work.
Courtney graduated from Bowdoin College with a B.A. in Environmental Studies and Visual Arts, and earned an M.F.A. in Painting from Hunter College, CUNY. At Hunter, she received the Leeman Boksenbaum Scholarship for foreign study and in 2008 studied painting at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, NL. In 2017, after 11 years in New York City, she returned to Maine to settle in the Mid-coast. She lives with her husband and two children in Camden.
Studio Manager: Reeder Fahnestock
rfahnestock@watershedceramics.org
Among his many duties, Studio Manager Reeder Fahnestock acts as an interface between the resident artists and the facilities by maintaining the kilns and equipment and providing safety and technical information and oversight for staff, assistants, and volunteers.
He received his B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute. He also attended Kansas State University, where he studied with Yoshiro Ikeda, was awarded the Strecker-Nelson Gallery MFA Scholarship, built a new wood kiln, and taught beginning and advanced ceramics. Most recently, he was the inaugural artist in residence at Pinon Hill Pottery in La Veta, Colorado. He was also an artist-in-residence for two years at Pope Valley Pottery in the Napa Valley in California. His son, Ri, is studio shop manager at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and recently came in second in a hotly contested National Wife Carrying Competition in nearby Sunday River.
Finance & Operations Manager: Tamsen Brooke Warner
twarner@watershedceramics.org