About KCAI FIBER

Fiber as a medium crosses boundaries and interfaces with art, design, craft and technology. Inherently multidisciplinary, the field of fiber encompasses, among others, painting, printing, dyeing, pattern design, sewing, quilting, garment construction for fashion and costume, weaving, knitting, crochet, basketry techniques, felting, spinning and paper-making.

The curriculum emphasizes skill development and the generation of ideas through a materials-based process of making. You’ll learn processes of traditional fiber art combined with the use of new digital tools. The need for a tactile experience in response to the digital environment is the most exciting development in our field. Fiber is more relevant and diverse now than ever before.

Our curriculum covers a broad range of traditional and experimental practices in a variety of textile-related areas that are unique within the U.S. Our students immerse themselves in the vocabulary and language of fiber from their sophomore to senior years. During their senior year, students choose a concentration and develop a body of work culminating their studies to be presented in a senior thesis project.

Faculty and Staff

Marie Bannerot McInerney, Professor and Chair

Marie Bannerot McInerney is a multidisciplinary studio artist and educator. Her site-responsive installations and discrete works in concrete, silk, handmade paper and canvas consider human agency within the framework of ecological systems, mystical thinking, and natural phenomena. She is a 2018 Charlotte Street Artist Award Fellow, a 2024 recipient of the Stone and DeGuire Contemporary Art Award and participated in residencies at Studios Inc and The Luminary. McInerney has exhibited across the United States and abroad including shows at the Bellevue Arts Museum (Bellevue, WA), Mildred Lane Kemper Museum (Saint Louis, MO) Friedrich Schiller University (Jena, Germany), and Han Tianheng Art Museum Shanghai (Shanghai City, China) as well as solo exhibitions at The Tarble Arts Center (Charleston, IL), Studios Inc. (Kansas City, MO), and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonvill, AR). McInerney co-authored an essay in the book, Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of our Contact Zone and was awarded a Cultural Exchange Grant from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin to present work. Her formative years were spent in Houston, TX before she earned a BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA at Washington University in Saint Louis.

McInerney believes there is great power in collaboration and has served as co-director and co-curator in two curatorial collaboratives: PLUG Projects (Kansas City, MO) and The Independent Art Market (Saint Louis, MO). She worked in the costume and fashion industry for over a decade as a knitwear designer and manufacturer for SKIF International and as the head dyer/painter for the costume shop at the Opera Theatre Saint Louis. Actively engaged in the field of hand papermaking she served on the board of directors for both Hand Papermaking and North American Hand Papermakers. McInerney is a professor in the Fiber Department at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Contact: mmcinerney@kcai.edu

Pauline Verbeek-Cowart, Senior Professor

Pauline Verbeek-Cowart, Senior Professor and former chair of the Fiber Department, has been on the faculty of the Kansas City Art Institute since 1997. A native of the Netherlands, she received her BFA (1982) in Fine Art from the Maryland Institute and her MFA in textile design from the University of Kansas (1995). Ms. Verbeek-Cowart’s academic and Fine Art careers have garnered her numerous awards including the Kansas City Art Institute’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2014), Excellence in Teaching Award (2007), Outstanding Special Project Award (2003) and the 2008 Kansas Arts Commission Master Fellowship in Visual Art/Fine Craft. Her creative research involves all areas of constructed textiles but is primarily focused on weaving. Most of her weavings span several feet in both directions and comment on the nature of woven surfaces. Through structure, material, image and/or surface treatments, she demonstrates that weaving is unique in building an image. She is one of the leaders in the use of new technologies in hand-weaving and has also conducted research using industrial looms in the Netherlands and the US. Her industrially woven work crosses boundaries between Fine Art and applied textiles and is directed toward structurally textured fabrics for apparel as well as home-furnishings. Her work has been exhibited extensively in both national and international venues including France, Austria, Germany, Japan, Korea and Australia.

Contact: pverbeek@kcai.edu

Kim Eichler-Messmer, Associate Professor

Associate Professor Kim Eichler-Messmer's work is grounded primarily in textiles, through which she explores nature and built environments using pattern, color, structure, line, and rhythm. Eichler-Messmer earned an MFA in textiles from the University of Kansas and a BFA in studio art from Iowa State University. Her work has been exhibited across the US and abroad, including shows at the Iowa Quilt Museum (Winterset, IA), QuiltCon, Penland Gallery (Penland, NC), India Quilt Festival (Chennai, India), and Tokushima Cultural Center (Tokushima, Japan). She was an artist in residence at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, and Prairieside Cottage + Outpost. She is the author of “Modern Color: An Illustrated Guide to Dyeing Fabric for Modern Quilts” and her work has been featured in “Quilting with a Modern Slant” by Rachel May, “The Essential Guide To Modern Quilt Making” edited by Heather Grant, and “The Uppercase Compendium of Craft and Creativity” by Janine Vangool. In addition to making one-of-a-kind hand-dyed art quilts, she designs fabric and has collaborated with Pottery Barn Teen on an exclusive quilt design. She spends her summers growing natural dye plants, working in studio, and teaching at craft schools and retreats including Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts , Penland School of Craft, and A Gathering of Stitches Slow Stitching Retreat.

Contact: keichler-messmer@kcai.edu

Rebecca Vaughan, Lecturer

Rebecca Vaughan was born and raised in Denver, CO. She has lived in the Netherlands and Canada. She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and BFA cum laude in Sculpture at the University of Colorado, Boulder. To more fully pursue her art career, she departed working in non-profits and has instructed part-time for the Kansas City Art Institute, and Johnson County Community College.

Rebecca Vaughan is a member, Board Member and Treasurer for the ARTNAUTS, an art collective which exhibits only in countries experiencing conflict. She previously served as the Artistic Director of PlatteForum, a non-profit which hosts artists-in-residence from all over the world. While in residence, the artists are paired with under-resourced youth to create artworks which address topics of social justice and community. She recently served as the Program Director for the Art Students League of Denver and was the Chair of Fine Arts and Head of Sculpture at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. She held a residency as a mentoring Resource Artist at Redline Contemporary Art Center and at the Tallgrass Prairie Artist Residency in Matfield Green, Kansas. Previously she worked as the project manager for Ann Hamilton's 2008 Circles of O performance, and assisted in other projects in Dialog: City, a city- wide arts event for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. 

She recently exhibited her work in a solo show at the 39th Sarajevo Winter Arts Festival in Bosnia and Herzigovina and will be included in Redline's 15X Anniversary exhibition at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. She has shown widely in the Colorado region as well as in New York, Palestine, Mexico, Canada, China and Columbia. Her work has been in publications including the Chicago Art Journal and KnitKnit. Vaughan has received state grants from the Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities and the Ohio Arts Council.

Contact: rvaughan@kcai.edu

Hadley Clark, Lecturer

Hadley Clark is a studio artist focusing on handmade wearables and floor-based sculptural pieces, all drawing from her belief in the vitality of material reuse and natural dye processes. Fashion Design training at The New School | Parsons Paris; work has been featured at Hammer Museum Restore (Los Angeles, CA), Cumulus International Design Conference (Paris, France), the Gothenburg Fashion Fair (Gothenburg, Sweden), residencies: Vermont Studio Center (VT), Haystack Mountain School of Craft (ME), Texere (Oaxaca, MX); work featured in W Magazine, Women’s Wear Daily, Nylon. She has worked for Tillman Lauterbach, Diane von Furstenberg, Lee Jeans, Ugg, and Ghada Amer.

Contact: hclark@kcai.edu

Jamie R. Urban, Lecturer

Jamie R. Urban is a costume designer, artist, and educator working at the intersection of fiber, performance, and object-based practice. She holds an MFA in Costume Design and Production from Boston University and a BFA in Theatre with a minor in Accounting from Emporia State University. Her work is rooted in material investigation, object-based storytelling, and the intersection of the handmade body—human or constructed—with narrative and movement. Grounded in collaboration, craftsmanship, and mentorship, Urban’s practice approaches costumes and constructed forms as sculptural objects activated through use, gesture, and time.

Urban’s professional experience spans theatre, dance, opera, film, and new work development, with a focus on draping, historical and contemporary tailoring, textile manipulation, and puppetry. She has worked across academic and professional contexts, contributing to productions and projects with universities, regional theatres, and interdisciplinary arts organizations throughout the United States.

Urban is Adjunct Faculty at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she teaches courses that integrate fiber techniques, patterning, and fabrication with conceptual inquiry and embodied making. Her teaching emphasizes hands-on experimentation, material literacy, and sustainable approaches to contemporary art and performance practice.

Contact: jurban@kcai.edu

Bea Bonanno, Lecturer

Bea Bonanno is a fiber artist living in Lawrence, Kansas. She has a BFA in Textile Design from The University of Kansas and produces her work in her home studio. Each of Bea’s pieces are woven using multi-harness looms that allow her to create intricate patterns embedded into the fabric. Her material selections are based largely on color and texture to create relationships between forms that intrigue and challenge expectations of traditional tapestry weaving techniques.

Contact: bbonanno@kcai.edu

Hùng Lê, Lecturer

Hùng Lê is an interdisciplinary artist born in Đồng Nai, Việt Nam. Their family immigrated to America when they were seven, settling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Immigrating at a young age has caused a lot of dissonance within their identity, which fostered their interest in memories, American culture, immigration, language, and citizenship as a means to understand themselves and the history that precedes them. Lê received their BFA and Asian Studies Certificate from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2022.  They have received multiple awards, including the Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award in 2025, the Windgate-Lamar Fellowship Award in 2022, the Jesse-Howard Fellowship in 2022, and the Charlotte Street Foundation Studio Residency in 2022.

Contact: hle@kcai.edu

Kadie Nugent, Lecturer

Through textiles and collage, Kadie Nugent investigates how materiality articulates questions of identity, belonging, and the search for meaning. They were an artist-in-residence at Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri and later worked with the Spencer Museum of Art’s Exhibitions team in Lawrence, Kansas. Kadie assistant taught at craft schools, including with embroidery artist Ruth Miller at Penland School of Craft in Spruce Pine, NC, and artist Delaney Smith at Arrowmont School of Craft in Gatlinburg, TN. After earning their MFA from the University of Kansas in 2020, Kadie continued their practice through residencies at Paducah AIR Studio in Paducah, KY, and Lackland Well in Farmville, VA.

Contact: knugent@kcai.edu

Tabbetha Evans, Lecturer

Tabbetha graduated from the Fiber department at KCAI in 1990. After a few years at Asiatica, she began designing prints, knitwear, and jewelry at Peruvian Connection. She continues to design for Peruvian Connection from her own studio in Kansas City.

Contact: tevans@kcai.edu

William Plummer, Fiber Technician

William Plummer is an artist and writer based in Kansas City, Missouri. They hold a BFA in Fiber and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute. In 2021, they participated in the Elsewhere residency program as a Kansas City Exchange Fellow. From 2018 to 2020, they collaborated with three other planaria-inspired artists and scientists on the exhibition Body of Inquiry: the Art, Biology, and Being of Flatworms. Plummer’s work is informed by their cross-cultural heritage and queer experience, often exploring themes of projection, translation, and transformation. 

Contact: wplummer@kcai.edu