"Don't You Wish Your Girlfriend Could Weld Like Me?" Panel discussion with female Structural Ironworkers, Architectural Fabricators and Fine Artists
Maker Faire Bay Area 2016
May 20th-22nd
The projects these women make require code compliance, nationally certified skills and years of training. Their jobs are technical, hard core, and hands on. Find out what it takes to get your skills to an elite level, and what it's like to have a career in extreme making.
Liisa Pine Schoonmaker
Liisa Pine Schoonmaker is a structural Welding Instructor and Welding Department Chairperson at Laney College in Oakland, CA. In a 25 year career she has built and operated large robots, worked on jet cars, built Exploratorium exhibits, set off explosives, traveled to art festivals, built funhouses and giant waterslides for the Discovery Channel, and taught thousands of people of all ages to weld.
Alice Hopkins
Alice is the lead metal fabricator at Because We Can, an architecture and design firm in Oakland, and does art restoration, metal finishing and fabrication for Studio Romo. With a BFA from The University of Cincinnati's college of Design Architecture Art and Planning, she originally specialized in lost-wax-method casting at John Kline's fine art foundry, Casting Arts and Technologies. Bronze casting remains part of her personal sculpture practice, in addition to her various commissions and illustration.
Diana Planson
Diana is the owner of DC Metalwork in San Francisco, and a Welding Instructor at The Crucible, the Tinkering School and the Marin School. With a degree in Fine Arts from the SF Art Institute, she has fabricated for Survival Research Laboratories and other artists, and built and drove on an all-woman Enduro Stock Car racing team, before spending ten years as a union Ironworker for local 377 in SF.
Lisa Davidson
Lisa has been a union Ironworker in local 377 for over fourteen years doing structural steel erection, after a career in film and animation, with a BA in Communications from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Ma. and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence R.I. . She's been a welder, rigger, installer and foreman on the construction of major buildings in the Bay Area, including the Bay Bridge, California Academy of Sciences Laguna Honda Hospital and Apple's new headquarters.
