The featured potter for 2013 will be making her first-ever appearance at the Western North Carolina Pottery Festival.

Gertrude Graham Smith, better known as Gay Smith, is an accomplished studio potter and teaching artist who single-fires her porcelain ware in a soda kiln in Bakersville, N.C., near Penland.

Gay is a Cum Laude graduate of Harvard University and has studied ceramics and visual design at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and the University of Oregon.

She's taught at a variety of institutions, including Harvard; Penland School of Crafts; Western Carolina University; East Tennessee State University; and the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland.

Her grant awards include a North Carolina Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowship in 2008-09, and a Regional Artist Project Grant through the Asheville Area Arts Council in 2009-10. She has held artist-in-residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation and Penland School of Crafts.

Gay's work is represented internationally and included in many fine galleries, such as: the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA; and the Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan.

She was featured in Ceramics Monthly magazine in 2007 and 2010, and Oxford American in 2010. Her work can be viewed in numerous publications.

For more info on Gay Smith, click here