Instructors
We host host top-notch carving, woodworking, basketry, and weaving instructors from around the U.S.
Meet the our core group of confirmed instructors. Additional craftspeople will be announced as they’re finalized.
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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
Barron Brown
Barron has been carving and making tools for more than 50 years. Based in Yancey County, North Carolina, he creates wooden and metal objects and teaches classes in bowl carving, spoon carving, and forging carving tools.
He began carving in 1964 and has focused seriously on green woodworking since 1989. Barron prefers to make the tools he and his students use, refining each one so it works well for its intended purpose.
Callan Burton-Shore
Callan is a hide tanner, farmer, and spoon carver. She has been carving spoons since she was 6 years old and carving semi-professionally for the last few years. Along with other traditional skills, she teaches carving to people of all ages (as young as 4 years old) at various schools throughout the south east. In addition to hosting her own classes, she has taught at John C. Campbell Folk School, Forest Floor Wilderness Programs, The Living Earth School, various earth skills gatherings, and beyond. She is especially passionate about carving tiny spoons!
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.
Henry Gardener
Henry Gardner is a green woodworker who makes kitchen utensils and other domestic pieces from locally sourced wood. His work is inspired by the Scandinavian slojd tradition of making beautiful and functional objects to be used in everyday life. In keeping with the slojd tradition he uses an axe, an assortment of knives, and other hand tools to make his spoons. He often uses colorful milk paints to accentuate the natural beauty of native hardwoods to Western North Carolina where he was born and raised.
Ralph Flanders
A lifelong hand-tool woodworker, Ralph draws inspiration from Eric Sloane, Roy Underhill, and the traditions of making useful things by hand. His long-term dream is to keep building one object after another until he has made a house and everything in it.
He also studies philosophy and runs a knife and tool sharpening business with his wife, Patricia. After attending GreenWood Wrights’Fest in 2024, he began carving spoons and has been hooked ever since. He brings together practical sharpening experience, deep respect for traditional craft, and a love of well-made hand tools.
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.
Kat King
Kat King is a spoon carver from Apex, North Carolina, whose journey began with a one-day class at New Light Wood Works taught by Bill Wallace. What started as an introduction to the craft quickly grew into a serious and lasting practice.
Kat now co-teaches spoon carving classes with Bill and demonstrates alongside him at the North Carolina State Fair, helping introduce others to the tools, techniques, and satisfaction of carving by hand. Her recent work has focused on expanding the decorative side of spoon carving, including chip carving and kolrosing, adding fine detail and personal expression to functional wooden objects.
As an instructor, Kat brings the perspective of someone who came to the craft through a single class and steadily built her skills through practice, curiosity, and community. Her teaching is approachable, encouraging, and grounded in the belief that spoon carving is a craft anyone can begin.
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.
Richard Moore
Richard Moore is a lifelong woodworker based in High Point, North Carolina. His interest in the craft began early, through industrial arts classes, and has continued for more than 50 years across professional woodworking, construction, cabinetry, and personal hand-tool work. He currently works as a contractor for Marsh Kitchens in High Point.
Richard has returned to the tools that first drew him into woodworking, with a renewed focus on traditional hand-tool techniques. His personal workspace is now almost entirely hand-tool oriented, and his projects include furniture, small boxes, home décor, and shop furniture.
Richard’s passion for traditional woodworking has naturally grown into teaching. He has facilitated workshops, demonstrated at events, and shared his knowledge through North Carolina Woodworker.net, a community he strongly recommends to anyone interested in the craft. As an instructor, Richard brings deep practical experience, patience, and a grounded respect for the skills that connect modern woodworkers to traditional techniques.
Bart Moyers
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.
Angela Robins
Angela Robins is a woodworker and educator, inspired by Scandinavian and Japanese wooden crafts, particularly the boat and the bowl. From axe carving to woodturning on the lathe, she works primarily with freshly cut wood. She has studied traditional woodworking in Japan, Norway, Sweden, and for two years as a resident in the artisan development program at North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota. She is a 2026 New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient and is creating stick-chairs using dead and standing ash trees from the property where she lives.
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.
Aaron Sparks
Aaron Sparks has been carving wooden spoons since 2017, when a family move from Santa Barbara to rural Ohio left him looking for a new creative outlet. What started as a hobby became a steady craft rooted in patience, hand tools, and the quiet satisfaction of making something useful from raw wood.
Aaron has been connected to GWWF since its early days and brings an approachable, generous teaching style to his workshops. He now lives in Durham with his wife, three kids, and a golden doodle who is, by all accounts, more enthusiastic than helpful.
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.
Micah Wiles
Micah Wiles is a farmer and craftsperson living in Kentucky in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. He has been weaving baskets for over twelve years with a focus on traditional white oak basket making during the past seven years. His practice of craft is place based and involves a connection with the land, utilizing local materials found in the landscape around him. He has studied the traditional baskets of Kentucky and Tennessee and has travelled internationally learning from basket makers in Romania, Ireland, England and Japan. Passing on knowledge and keeping traditional skills alive is important to Micah and he teaches a variety of classes on his farm as well as at craft schools throughout the region.