Penland School of Crafts

Penland School of Crafts is a national center for craft education located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Penland was founded by Miss Lucy Morgan, a teacher at an Episcopalian school that once occupied several buildings which are still part of Penland. In 1923, she organized the Penland Weavers which provided looms and materials to local women and marketed their handwoven goods. She invited guest instructors to teach weaving, and when requests for instruction began to come from other parts of the country, Penland School was born. Soon after the first students arrived in 1929, other crafts were added and the school began to raise funds, acquire property, and construct buildings.

Since that time, Penland has grown to encompass about 400 acres and 41 structures. Today, over 1,200 people come each year seeking instruction in ten craft media. The school offers one- and two-week classes in the summer and and eight-week sessions in the spring and fall. Each class is structured by the teacher, but most are a mix of demonstrations, lectures, individual studio work,and field trips. A stay at Penland also offers daily movement classes, evening slide shows, visits to nearby studios, a library, volleyball games, dances, walks in the beautiful countryside, or a swim in the Toe River.

An on-campus coffee house provides hot and cold drinks, snacks, and a place to meet or hang out. The school supply store features a variety of hand tools and craft materials along with UPS shipping, books, postcards, film, snacks, drinks, and other items.

Students live at Penland and may participate in activities on a twenty-four-hour basis. Housing is simple but adequate. (We can only house students enrolled in classes.) The Pines dining room provides three delicious meals each day. There are always choices for vegetarians, but we cannot accommodate special dietary needs. The nearest medical facility is the Spruce Pine Hospital, located ten miles away.

Studios and student activities are consolidated in a central campus. However, not all of the housing is centralized and some students have the benefit of an early morning walk to breakfast and a starlit stroll home.

What can you expect from a sojourn at Penland? You can expect to work hard, learn a lot, make friends, and forget about the rest of the world in an isolated setting without the distraction of phones, television, or daily newspapers. You can expect to have fun, eat a lot, and get the kind of rest that comes from total immersion in something you love.




Penland's Mission
The mission of Penland School of Crafts is individual and artistic growth through craft.

Penland enriches the lives of individuals by teaching skills, stimulating ideas, and promoting the value of craft in the world. Everyone is welcome, from beginning and advanced craft practitioners to the general public. Penland offers a learning environment which is beautiful, stimulating, and egalitarian. It is a place where people love to work, feel free to experiment, and frequently exceed their own expectations. Penland's programs encompass traditional and contemporary craft, and seek to acknowledge the human spirit which is universally expressed through craft.




Penland Classes
Workshops are the core of Penland’s educational program.

Each summer, the school offers 98 one- or two-week classes in books and paper, clay, drawing and painting, glass, iron, metals, photography, printmaking, textiles, wood, and other media.

In the spring and fall, Penland has seven classes that run for eight weeks. These long sessions, called Concentrations, are unlike anything else offered in craft: almost as long as a college semester with the focused intensity of the single-subject workshop. We also offer a few one-week classes in the spring and fall.

Penland has no standing faculty—instructors and students come to the school for the duration of their session. Students at Penland take only one class at a time, making it possible to cover a tremendous amount of material and to form close relationships with other students in a few weeks.

The variety of classes offered is one of Penland’s great strengths. In addition to the array of media, Penland’s workshops range from broad introductory classes to those covering a single technique. There are offerings for beginning, intermediate, and advanced students, with the bulk of the classes welcoming all three.




Resident Artist Program
The Penland School Resident Artist Program seeks to enrich the total educational experience at Penland by providing a stimulating, supportive environment for artists at transitional points in their careers. Penland resident artists are full-time, self-supporting craftspeople who live and work at the school for three years.

The resident program was founded in 1963 by Bill Brown, Penland's second director. It created an opportunity for craft artists to hone their skills, to develop markets, to experiment, to develop new work, or possibly to move from a career in teaching to one of full-time making. It allows participants to explore a transitional time in an atmosphere of learning and community, where they may choose to interact with the hundreds of studio artists, teachers, and students who pass through the school each year. It also provides students with models for a life in craft.

Consistent with his vision of Penland as the nexus of a working craft community, Brown also saw the program as a means of encouraging craftspeople to settle in the area. Today, there are over one-hundred craft artists working in the immediate vicinity, and forty of them are former resident artists.

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