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Janet Koplos

Janet Koplos is co-author of Makers: A History of American Studio Craft (2010) and author of Contemporary Japanese Sculpture (1990) and other books. She has written extensively on crafts and on American, Japanese and Dutch contemporary art and has published approximately 2,500 articles, reviews and essays in some two dozen periodicals over the last 30 years. She was for 18 years a staff editor at Art in America magazine and is currently a contributing editor. She lectures, critiques and juries frequently, and has taught at Parsons The New School for Design and Pratt Institute in New York, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Minnesota and holds a master’s degree from Illinois State University. She received a National Endowment for the Arts critic’s grant early in her career, in 2010 was named an Honorary Fellow of the American Crafts Council, and in 2015 was awarded an Art Writers Grant from the Warhol Foundation and Creative Capital. She is currently working on two books, one on the aesthetics and philosophy of American functional pottery, based on interviews with potters across the country, and the other a history of the New Art Examiner, a sometimes-controversial publication based in Chicago, which published from 1973 to 2002.