Our Board

Lisa Check

Lisa Check is founder and owner of Flying Goat Farm.  A spinner, weaver, knitter, and artisan dyer, she loves her sheep, angora goats, and all their fine fiber. Lisa designs her farm yarn to be delightful to the eye and to the hand.  She is committed to the slow fashion and fibershed values.  Lisa is a certified ASI Level II Wool Classer. She teaches spinning, weaving, and dyeing on her Maryland solar powered and sustainably tended farm.

Mary Kingsley

Mary Kingsley is co-founder and owner of Lady Farmer, LLC, a sustainable apparel and lifestyle brand that she runs with her daughter, Emma Kingsley. She and Emma also co-host The Good Dirt Podcast, a show that explores the connections between soil health and all aspects of a sustainable lifestyle. Mary lives on a small farm in Seneca, Maryland, with her husband and their resident sheep, ponies, chickens, dogs and a barn cat.  She enjoys playing in her garden and growing various fruits, vegetables, flowers and herbs for nourishing meals, home-grown medicinals and the plant-dyed textile goods she creates in her home dye studio.  Mary shares her passion for a slower, more earth-centered and seasonal way of life through her teaching and writing, and is the author of the recently published Lady Farmer Guide to Slow Living.

Katie Mullen

Katie Mullen (they/she) comes to the Fibershed with a background in environmental education, outreach, and restoration in addition to a passion for fiber arts. Their career highlights include voyaging around the Chesapeake Bay on the skipjack Sigsbee, guiding students through Smith Island’s salt marshes, and restoring eroded streams in Anne Arundel County. As a knitter and overall fiber enthusiast, they plan to leverage their skills to advance Chesapeake Fibershed’s mission, foster community connections, and support a sustainable fiber revolution in the Chesapeake Watershed. Based in Baltimore, Katie can often be found curled up on the couch with a new knitting project, completing quality assurance tests at her local ice cream shop, or hiking with her greyhound, Horse.

Martha Polkey

Martha Polkey has been raising sheep since 1984, and now shepherds a flock of white and natural colored Merinos at Black Sheep Farm in Loudoun County, Virginia, providing breeding stock for producers, quality fleeces for hand-spinners, and prepared fiber for felters. She has long been active in local, state, regional, and national shepherds’ organizations, and conservation and preservation organizations. She is editor of Maryland Sheep News, the quarterly publication of the Maryland Sheep Breeders Association.

Sarah Rider

Sarah Rider, along with her husband, Tom Paduano own Flying Plow Farm in Rising Sun, Maryland. Established in 2010, Flying Plow produces certified organic vegetables, meat, and eggs on their 56-acre farm. They distribute through their CSA with over 600 subscribers across Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. In addition to what they produce, Flying Plow also carries products from dozens of regional farms and food producers. Prior to starting Flying Plow, Sarah spent a decade in sustainable agriculture working for, and managing, diverse livestock and vegetable operations, while running her own direct market beef farm enterprise. She is a Penn State graduate with a B.S. degree in Agroecosystems Science (Agronomy). Sarah is relatively new to the fiber world, after working in almost every other corner of ag. She currently raises about 80 Border Cheviot ewes on her farm and is studying the feasibility of growing flax and hemp. Sarah is most interested in finding solutions to the broad value-chain processing issues surrounding wool, flax, and fiber hemp.

Ghazal Jafari

Ghazal Jafari is a designer, weaver, and educator invested in woven matter as a bridge between ecology, landscape narratives, cultural histories, women’s art, and multispecies environmental justice. Originally of Persian and Azeri descent from the headwaters in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, she has found weaving to be her ancestral medium of indexing collective history and a foundation of survival.

Professionally trained as an architect, landscape ethnographer, and ecological urbanist, Ghazal’s interest in the regional fibersheds is rooted in a commitment to cultural resurgence in the field of material design between textile and architecture, one in which environmental health and non-extractive economies are central criteria. Ghazal is an assistant professor of urban and environmental planning at University of Virginia, eager to work with actors and stewards of land across the world of textiles from field to fiber to fold.
 

Susan Skalak

Susan Skalak, while owning a fabric store near Seattle, decided she wanted to make a local wool fabric after buying fabrics from around the world for her store with almost none of them coming from the United States. After that stint in the Pacific Northwest, she and her husband returned to Central Virginia to purchase a farm. Learning about Fibershed during the pandemic, and using her skills from her mechanical engineering manufacturing and design background, she chose Tunis sheep and mohair as the fiber of choice to make boiled wool for outerwear after experimenting with many wool breeds and other fibers. She is excited to bring her knowledge and skills to help grow the Chesapeake Fibershed and bring more local wool products to our area.

Kerstin Zurbrigg

Kerstin Zurbrigg is an artist with an ongoing interest in the exploration of our personal and historic connections to place.  Kerstin has lived in the DC area for 17 years homeschooling her three children, teaching and exploring immersive and integrated fiber arts.  She enjoys spinning farm yarns, and celebrates her ever evolving relationships to the natural world through gardening and through the exploration of the colors and healing qualities of plants in botanical dyeing.  Kerstin studied ecology/marine biology and painting at Hampshire College, painting and sculpture at the New York Studio School and received her Masters of Arts at Goldsmith’s College, University of London.  Kerstin received her Waldorf handwork training from the Fiber Crafts Studio in NY.  Before landing in the DC area, Kerstin taught at the American University in Cairo, and showed her work in London, Cairo, Cuba and NYC.