Plenary Speaker and Panelist

Brenda Hornsby Heindl is an independent scholar and practicing potter. She is a graduate of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and an alumna of Berea College in Kentucky where she worked in the Ceramics Apprenticeship Program.  Her prior work includes the Head of the Ceramics Department at Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates Auctions in Virginia, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, and the Ceramics and Glass Department at Colonial Williamsburg. She also lectures and presents workshops on historic ceramics, kilns, and pottery manufacturing. As a production potter, she built a wood-firing, salt-glaze kiln in 2012, and uses her studio, Liberty Stoneware, as an outlet for historic ceramics research and pottery production. Since 2014 after working with individual pieces of historic pottery and finding little or no information about the potters who were Free People of Color, Brenda has been researching Free and Enslaved potters working in the South prior to the American Civil War in order to reconcile the records of their lives and bring to light the work they made.