Glassblowing

with Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez
GLASS 681 001 | 3 credits | $350 Lab Fee
June 15–28, 2025

This course will cover the fundamentals of glassblowing and is designed to develop a student’s foundational knowledge and skill upon which more advanced ideas can be built. Students will learn to gather hot glass out of the furnace and how to manipulate it with a variety of tools and techniques in both the hot shop and the cold shop. Productive practices including working as a team, timing and choreography, and using natural elements to execute ideas will be demonstrated. This course may include a screening of Glassmakers of Herat. We will investigate glassblowing from a historical approach and look at objects from different periods in history, including works made by Pino Signoretto, Bill Gudenrath, and Karen Willinbrink-Johnsen. Assignments will range from functional cup making, executing complex abstractions, and methods for coloring and patterning. This course will culminate in the completion of a student designed sculpture or installation to be exhibited in the hot shop.

Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez, shifting countenance, 2015, flameworked and blown glass, performance, mask: 9.5 x 7 x 4.5 in.

Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez (she/her) combines poetry, images, glass objects, and neon light to create objects and installations that draw inspiration from her Puerto Rican and Persian heritage. She is the inaugural winner of the Adele and Leonard Leight Award from the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. She has been an artist in residence at Blue Mountain Center, Pilchuck Glass School and the Corning Museum of Glass, among others. Her work has been shown in dozens of museums and galleries in the US and abroad including the Museum of Craft and Design, Traver Gallery, Tacoma Museum of Glass, BWA Wrocław, and Glasmuseet Ebeltoft. Victoria is passionate about social change and arts education, and was previously the Director of The Bead Project at UrbanGlass, a program geared towards supporting people of diverse cultural and economic backgrounds as they learn how to work with the material. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Tyler School of Art, from which she received her BFA. She holds an MFA in Craft/Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University.