Meet Our Faculty

Maureen Chatfield

My paintings are intuitive responses to the myriad forces that shape my life—emotions that translate into color, visual memories of forms and color relationships found in the landscape, and personal stories from my past. I have painted consistently since childhood, starting with oils, and am currently painting with acrylics as well which enables me to create multiple layers rapidly without muddying my palette. The work process is one of constant experiment and change— building layers of color, form and image on the canvas revealing the underlying pentimento. My paintings are not planned, they are discovered, an evolution that is exciting and invigorating.

Of my four current series, Ether is the more interior, emerging directly from what is in my head, while Landscapes arises from direct experience—what I see in nature, captured by my internal camera and explosively transformed. Out of My Mind and Little Jewels also focuses on direct experience; however, the experience is of human nature- relationships- childhood memories, family outings. Together these series form a body of work that transcends topicality and embraces an ever-expanding approach to art that reflects a desire to spread joy and beauty through the transformative power of the creative process.

Margaret Fanning

For New Jersey native and artist Margaret Fanning, art has been woven into her life from a young age.  Influenced and encouraged by her grandmother, who was an artist herself, Margaret explored new worlds with the pastels and watercolor paints she found lying about her grandmother’s studio.  Margaret went on to study at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) where she earned her BFA in Painting.

Margaret Fanning has exhibited internationally and her art can be found in private collections throughout the U.S. and Europe.  She has won multiple awards including the Alexander Portfolio Award and the NJ Chapter of the American Artists Professional League Traditional Realism Award.

Rebecca Kelly

Rebecca is a curator, storyteller, natural dyer, book and textile artist and weaves her art forms together to make new forms like innovative book arts, embroidered, knitted and crocheted artwork and natural watercolor paintings. Her work has been exhibited recently at South Haven Center for the Arts in Illinois, The Philadelphia Museum of Art Library, St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, NY and The Hunterdon Art Museum. Rebecca curated the award-winning Bucks County Community ArtMobile in 2009-2011, transFORMations: Art Made from Recycled and Reused Materials which was viewed by over 40,000 individuals!

Rebecca Kelly is a Creative Center Hospital Artist-In-Residence at both NYU Langone Perlmutter Cancer Center and Bellevue Hospital Center. For over two decades, Rebecca has been on the teaching artist roster of Young Audiences of New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania. After ten years of living in East Harlem, NY, Rebecca moved recently to Upper Bucks County, she is currently a teaching artist for The Hunterdon Art Museum, The Banana Factory and Lehigh University Art Galleries. She feels passionately that art making deeply heals both the teacher and the student.

Vasiliki Katsarou

Vasiliki Katsarou was born in Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard College, University of Paris I-Sorbonne, and Boston University.

She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose first collection, Memento Tsunami, was published in 2011. She is also the co-editor of two contemporary poetry anthologies: Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems and Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems, all by Ragged Sky Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

In 2014, Vasiliki was one of seventy national and international poets to read at the 15th biennial Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey, the largest poetry festival in the United States. She has also served as Geraldine R. Dodge Poet in the Schools in New Jersey since 2013.

Vasiliki Katsarou has read her work widely, including at Manhattan’s National Arts Club, Cornelia St. Café, and KGB Bar, as well as at the Princeton Arts Council, Princeton University, and the Princeton Public Library.

Her poetry has been published internationally, including in NOON: Journal of the Short Poem (Japan), Corbel Stone Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series (U.K.), Regime Journal (Australia), as well as in Poetry Daily, Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature, Wild River Review, wicked alice, Literary Mama, La Vague Journal, bottlerockets, and Contemporary American Voices.

An active literary arts advocate, she is founding director of the Panoply Books Reading Series in Lambertville, NJ, and has organized many community poetry and art events. She currently works with artists and poets at the ArtYard contemporary arts center and the Hunterdon Art Museum in New Jersey.

Martha Kelshaw

Lucie Maragni

Kristen Marusic

Oscar Peterson

Oscar Peterson was born in Harlem, New York, raised in Brooklyn, NY, and is currently a resident of Millburn Township, NJ. He has worked as a professional art director and designer/illustrator for various corporations and non-profits, and as a commissioned fine arts painter who specializes in portraiture. An alumnus of Pratt Institute and The Art Students League of NY, Peterson has studied with such leading realist painters as Nelson Shanks, Max Ginsberg, and Costa Vavagiakis. His works, both portrait and non-commissioned, are in corporate and private collections and museums across the country.

He uses traditional methods and techniques while incorporating new ideas and personal observations. His preferred medium is oil, although he frequently uses many mediums. Peterson describes his paintings as “realistic with an impressionistic feel,” and his artistic style is inspired by the Impressionists and the Old Masters. His approach echoes a favorite quote from Alberto Giacometti; “The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.”

Linda Schroeder

Linda Schroeder received her degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is an independent artist and teacher. Linda also works commercially as an interior decor consultant and professional muralist.

Lena Shiffman

Lena Shiffman attended Spectrum Institute of Commercial Art in NJ, and later studied at The Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League in New York City. She is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and member of Rutgers University council on children’s Literature (RUCCL). 

Lena’s first book was Keeping a Christmas Secret written by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, which received a Christopher award in 1989. Since then she has created many drawings for Cricket Magazine and illustrated numerous books for Scholastic Inc., including Dancing with Manatees, which has sold more than half a million copies in countries all over the world.

Liz Tracey

As a certified elementary educator, Liz has been in the education field for over twenty years. She is currently teaching art classes to 4-6 year olds at the Hunterdon Art Museum.  While she has been exploring yoga over the past 20 years it became an integral part of her daily life in 2014 when she attended the first outdoor yoga class of Gist Finley. Liz later did her training in Sivananda yoga at the Ahimsa School in Clinton. Liz has found that yoga is not just a physical activity but truly a way of living all aspects of life and enjoys sharing all she has learned and is still learning with her students.