Instructors
We host host top-notch carving, woodworking, basketry, and weaving instructors from around the U.S.
Keynote Instructor: Roy Underhill
Roy Underhill is best known as the creator and host of the PBS series The Woodwright’s Shop, one of the longest running programs in the history of television. He holds a B.F.A. in directing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a M.F. from Duke University. He is the author of seven books and many articles on early technology.
As a Master Craftsman and, later, Director of Interpretive Development for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, he developed award-winning programs and training in presentation skills. He continues his work in the both communication skills and hand craftsmanship through consulting, training, and speaking engagements.
Roy Underhill now lives in a restored water-powered mill in the country near his Woodwright’s School in Pittsboro, NC and he carries his axe wherever he goes.
Instructors
Sunny Beach
Sunny has been interested in woodworking and craft his entire life. In 2018 he was introduced to green wood spoon carving. This art form combines woodworking, three dimensional design, and meditative activity. Sunny has organized several local meetups and classes in Southeast Michigan in order to help new carvers and foster community. He participates in Rise Up and Carve, the Zoom Based Carving Group, and helped create the repository of spoon challenges. He is also a moderator for the “Spoon Carving, Green Woodworking and Sloyd” Facebook group. Maintaining a (nearly) daily carving practice and participating in groups led to an increased interest in different forms and techniques.
Barron Brown
Barron started carving in 1964 and has been seriously doing green woodworking since 1989. He prefers making the tools that he and his students use in order to make them work well for their purpose.
Callan Burton-Shore
Raised in the woods of Virginia, Callan fell in love with creating things by hand from materials found in her local ecosystem. Now living in North Carolina, she is an ancestral skills teacher and traditional craftsperson. She teaches spoon carving, hide tanning, friction fire and other skills to children and adults throughout the country.
Daniel Clay
Daniel Clay is a woodworker, designer and artist living and working in Knoxville. He has written for Fine Woodworking magazine and is the author of Chip Carving: Techniques For Carving Beautiful Patterns By Hand. In addition to his full-time woodwork/art/design practice in Knoxville, Daniel travels the U.S. teaching chip carving.
Angela Eastman
Delia Fian
Delia Fian gathers wild and invasive plants from edge spaces, along roadsides and in abandoned lots, transforming them into works of art. She weaves baskets for everyday use – to hold, to wear, to imbue the mundane with beauty and wonder. Her approach to basketry is rooted in her devotion to living a handmade life with her family in the mountains of western North Carolina. Delia has written a book on weaving wild and invasive plants, to be released in August 2026.
Dan Green
Dan Green runs Woodcrest Farm, a working farm and blacksmith’s forge in Hillsborough, NC, practicing sustainable agriculture and offering camps, classes, events, and tours.
Earl Ijames
Earl Ijames is the Curator of African American History at the North Carolina Museum of History and is also an Emmy Award-winning documentarian and tree farmer.
Tad Kepley
Jason Lonon
Jason Lonon is a craftsman and teacher living and working in the same valley his ancestors have called home since the 1840s. Concurrent to serving an apprenticeship in traditional woodworking, Jason began blacksmithing as a teenager in the late 1990s. Today Jason and a team of highly skilled craftsmen produce a line of specialty carving tools for traditional woodworkers. Over the years, Jason has taught welding, blacksmithing, woodcarving and other skills in a wide variety of settings from the community college system to wilderness camps.
Photo by Peter Taylor Photography
Mozzy Marzano
Mike “Mozzy the Maker” Marzano has been carving spoons since 2019 and turning on the spring pole lathe since 2022.
Jasper Mayer
Jasper is an amateur timbersport competitor who is passionate about sustainable living and hand tool woodworking. He was sixteen when he decided to build his own timberframe shop in Pittsboro, NC, with traditional techniques.
Richard Moore
Richard Moore grew up woodworking of some sort most of his life. He was inspired to get involved in hand tool woodworking in the eighties after watching Roy Underhill for years and reading James Krenov. While working many different job roles in his life, he always continued woodworking. Richard, @greywolf is President and has lead and worked with North Carolina Woodworker Inc. an on line organization, that puts on local woodworking workshops. He teaches handsaw sharpening, and French polish finishing. He is a dynamic instructor who enjoys watching his students light bulbs turn on.
Will Myers
Will is a native of north western North Carolina. Woodworking in some way shape or form has been a lifelong hobby of his. Will is a mostly hand tool woodworker but does use the powered stuff for material prep and rough dimensioning of stock.
Measuring and documenting vintage furniture, then attempting to figure out the processes past makers used to build it is one of his favorite aspects of the craft. Then using the information and lesson learned from the old pieces to build new furniture.
Don Nalezyty
Don Nalezyty has been carving since he was a child. Despite a day job in the IT world, he studied arts and design at university and has always had the need to make things with his hands. For the last 14 years, he has focused on carving, kolrosing, and finishing greenwood spoons and other treen. He has studied with woodworkers from across the globe learning traditional methods for working with green or unseasoned wood. As an internationally recognized spoon carver, Don has taught workshops in spoon carving and decoration across the US and abroad.
Damien Ossi
Damien is a spoon carver and a nature nerd from the Washington, DC area. He started whittling before he was ten years old and began figure carving in his teens. He got into greenwoodworking ten years ago, but he still carves dry wood occasionally. For his day job he’s a wildlife biologist who conserves and restores habitats for rare animal wildlife in DC.
Nico Piedrahita
Since he was a kid, Nico’s always wanted to live in the woods. For the last 10 years, he’s been fulfilling that dream, living off-grid in the mountains around Asheville, and studying the skills and knowledge it takes to meet his own needs from the land. That “simple” act, of meeting a need for himself, ties him closer to the land and all the beings around him. His main areas of focus have been hide tanning and woodworking, and he now runs a business tanning hides, carving spoons and bowls, and teaching these skills to the local community. You can see what classes are coming up, and what products he has available, at woodlandworkshopnc.com, or by finding him @woodlandworkshopnc on Instagram.
Peter Ross
Peter Ross is the preeminent whitesmith for museum-quality locks and tools and former head blacksmith for Williamsburg. He specializes in reproductions of 17th and 18th century English American wrought ironwork, black and bright. He now works making teaching, and selling hand-forged historic hardware and tools in Chatham County, NC.
Neal Thomas
Neal Thomas is an 85 year old farmer, artist and basket maker from Wendell, NC. Mr. Thomas has been honored for his craftsmanship when he received the North Carolina Heritage award. When he was in his 20’s he learned to pick the right tree, fell it, then rive and split the pole to make wonderful durable white oak baskets from an elder craftsman named Herman Holder. We are honored to have him coming to our festival to share his skills with the next generation of green woodworkers.
Ty Thornock
Ty grew up in the desert valleys of Washington State amidst orchards and onions. He grew up around woodworking but hadn’t discovered greenwood carving until 2013 while watching an episode of the Woodwright’s Shop in which they carved a spoon. With a couple of cheap knives and an old carpenter’s hatchet, he began his carving journey. With six children and a limited time and a limited budget, spoon carving made the perfect entry point into carving.
Now living in Iowa, Ty is a teacher of talented and gifted students at a rural school where he also runs an after-school carving club for students in 4th through 8th grade. In the carving community, Ty is best known for his kolrosed spoons. His passion is making carving accessible to children and much of his time is devoted to this endeavor.