ABOUT
For at least 27,000 years, peoples from across the globe have discovered ways of weaving. Within different regions unique traditions developed, created by the confluence of technology, material, and culture. At the Newbury School of Weaving, we preserve and teach the Euro-American expression of traditional textile making. This system has much in common with traditions found throughout the globe, from eastern Asia to Africa and Central and South America, due to spontaneous human discovery and the spread of technology.
When the school was founded by Norman Kennedy, the methods taught were those he learned in Scotland in the first half of the 20th century. Since that time the school has expanded to include techniques researched from sources dating to the 19th century and earlier, with an emphasis on rediscovering those techniques that have fallen out of use over the past 150 years. This tradition reaches back 1,000 years to the introduction of the horizontal loom to Western Europe during the Middle Ages and is the same one that was brought to early America through European colonization. This time honored way of making cloth was widespread in our region before it all but disappeared under the power loom and was ignored by the craft revivals of the 20th century. Today, the Newbury community is the heart of this vibrant tradition in the United States.
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Founded in 1975 as Marshfield School of Weaving in Marshfield, Vermont, the school relocated its operations to Newbury, Vermont in 2024. In recognition of the outpouring of community support that made the move possible, the school changed its name to The Newbury School of Weaving in 2025. Though the location has changed, the school's dedication to traditional craft, research, preservation, and education has never been stronger.
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HISTORY
NORMAN KENNEDY
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In the 1930s, when handweaving all but ceased to exist, the clattering of a few old hand looms behind an Aberdeen, Scotland tenement caught Norman Kennedy’s attention. Drawn to the work, he traveled through the Outer Hebrides learning Gaelic, folksongs, and an unbroken textile tradition that stretched back centuries. In 1965, Norman was invited to perform at the Newport Folk Festival, returned the following year, and by 1967 was the Master Weaver at Colonial Williamsburg. With the support of Virginia Stranahan he founded the Marshfield School of Weaving in 1975 which he ran until it closed for a period beginning in 1992. The National Endowment for the Arts recognized Norman’s remarkable preservation of the folk tradition naming him a National Heritage Fellow in 2003.
KATE SMITH
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In 1976, Kate Smith enrolled in a six-week scuba diving class, and while riding on a bus, sat next to a woman whose daughter taught weaving in Putney, Vermont. Captivated by the thought of learning to weave, Kate changed her plans, ditched scuba diving, and headed north. At Marshfield she discovered Norman Kennedy and the school, igniting a passion for working with historic equipment and weaving traditional textiles. Kate became Norman's apprentice until the school closed in 1992, when she founded Eaton Hill Textile Works, a studio dedicated to recreating historic fabrics, and continued to teach students on a small scale. In the early 2000s Kate re-opened the Marshfield School of Weaving in its original location. Kate retired from the weaving school in 2023, and still, after all these years, has never gone scuba diving.
Class sizes are intimate and instruction can be tailored to a wide range of traditional and contemporary work. Our staff instructors are not just teachers, but are also professional handweavers and bring a unique perspective on what it means to practice a deep-rooted craft in the modern world.
STAFF
JUSTIN SQUIZZERO
DIRECTOR
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Justin’s earliest memories of his grandmother are also his first memories of wool. An avid spinner, weaver, and dyer, Justin’s grandmother taught him how to spin yarn on a great wheel that descended in his mother’s family while he was still a child. By his teenage years his interests grew to spinning flax and weaving, clearing most of the space in his bedroom to accommodate a historic four-post loom. In 2007, while working at Plimoth Patuxet Museums, Justin met Norman and Kate and spent several winters at Marshfield learning traditional weaving technique. In 2013 he left the museum field and returned to Marshfield to weave for Eaton Hill Textile Works, and in 2017 started his own business, The Burroughs Garret. Upon Kate's retirement in 2023, Justin became the school's Director. Justin weaves linen damask using a 19th-century Jacquard loom and has exhibited his work internationally. Through teaching he is dedicated to rebuilding a connection between today’s weavers and the handweaving tradition that existed before the 20th century. View Justin's CV here.
VISITING INSTRUCTORS
MARINA CONTRO
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Marina Contro is weaver, artist, and textile designer based in San Francisco, California. She came to Marshfield School of Weaving as a student in 2013 and has been returning ever since. Her work uses weaving as a means to explore functionality, domesticity, and the role of objects in our lives. Marina is an Adjunct Professor in the Textiles department at California College of the Arts and previously at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received an MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BA from the University of Colorado in Boulder. She has held residencies at Castello di Potentino, A-Z West, Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio, and (most importantly) Marshfield School of Weaving.
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JOANN DARLING
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Joann Darling's passion for learning from the plants began at a young age with her grandmother and mother's teachings. As a fifth-generation Vermonter she has deep planted roots in this region and its flora. She ran a perennial nursery and cut flower business, Gardens of Seven Gables on her childhood homestead for fourteen years. Passionate about natural dyeing, Joann has been teaching at The Newbury School of Weaving for the past decade. Her interests focus on sustainable practices and dye material that can be found in the local landscape.
Currently, she holds the position of adjunct faculty for the Roots program, and is the apothecary garden manager at the Vermont Center for Integrated Herbalism in Plainfield, Vermont. Joann is also program director for Good Food Good Medicine, a nonprofit food justice program at affordable housing sites in Barre, Vermont. The program offers food Justice education to the residents and their children in the onsite garden they plant, tend, and harvest from.
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During the summer Joann enjoys teaching children at “Herb Camps” for the nonprofit Altogether Now in East Montpelier.
ELENA KANAGY-LOUX
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Elena Kanagy-Loux is a descendent of the Amish and grew up between the US and Japan, where she was immersed in both traditional Mennonite crafts and the DIY fashion scene in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood. After earning her BFA in Textile Design from FIT, she won a grant which funded a four-month trip to study lacemaking across Europe in 2015. Upon returning to NYC, she co-founded Brooklyn Lace Guild, an organization dedicated to the preservation of making lace by hand, and began teaching bobbin lace classes. She completed her MA in Costume Studies at NYU in 2018, basing her thesis on interviews with lacemakers that she conducted on her European travels, and started working as the Collections Specialist at the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the fall of 2023, she left the museum to embark on a PhD at Bard Graduate Center, focusing on the history of global colonial lace production.
PERRY LEWIS
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Perry Lewis is an artist, weaver and maker who first learned to weave while getting her bachelors degree at Savannah College of Art and Design. Although she’s been weaving for over a decade, she really honed her craft while doing a work study program at Marshfield School of Weaving in 2021 and doing independent studies every summer thereafter. Often approaching weaving from a less traditional viewpoint, much of her work plays with structure, color, fiber, and how they interact with each other. She is interested in making both highly functional and highly unfunctional cloth, and very little in between. After spending twelve years in Brooklyn, she now lives and works in upstate New York.
ANNE LOW
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Anne Low is an artist and weaver who is currently living on an island in the Salish Sea. She first came to study weaving at the Marshfield School of Weaving in 2013 and since then has spent many summers weaving and learning in Vermont. Hand woven textile history informs much of her work, alongside other arcane material histories, from that of utilitarian objects to furniture making. Despite being grounded in highly specific techniques, her work seeks to understand how these ways of making can provide a conduit to explore the less tangible aspects of subjectivity, desire and memory. She exhibits her work internationally and was shortlisted for the Loewe Craft Prize in 2017.
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ANDREA MYKLEBUST
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Andrea is a shepherd, fiber artist, educator, and bast fiber researcher based in southern Vermont. She is a handspinner and weaver with a longtime interest in antique textile tools. Her work in natural fiber research focuses on the revitalization of local and regional textile production systems as a means to confront climate change and revitalize rural economies. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Northern New England Fibershed, and was the recipient of a 2017/18 USDA SARE grant exploring the growing and processing of flax for community-scale linen production.
Her research at the Smokey House Center in Danby, Vermont includes fiber hemp production in partnership with the University of Vermont, and work towards the development of regionally-scaled bast fiber processing infrastructure for New England. She is a graduate of Macalester College, St. Paul, MN.
Find Andrea on Instagram at @mountainheartvt
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Reconstituted in 2015, our 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization assumed responsibility for managing the operations of The Newbury School of Weaving at the start of 2023. Learn more about how you can support the school, and meet our Board of Directors below.
Denise LeBlanc
Chair
Diane Howes
Clerk
Jesse Klein Seret
Vice Chair
Nancy Fee Cook
Member-at-Large
John Schratwieser
Treasurer
Eliza West
Member-at-Large
NEWS
The best way to stay up-to-date with The Newbury School of Weaving is by subscribing to our mailing list. An archive of past newsletters may be accessed below.​
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