Bio

Jennifer Schumacher Waller is a ceramic artist who creates impermanent, unfired clay installations exploring memory, grief, vulnerability, and renewal. Her work considers what we hold onto, what falls away, and what remains. She embraces the process, material, and experimentation of clay, allowing her installations to shift, erode, and transform over time.

Originally from the West Coast and now based in New Orleans, Louisiana, Waller received her BFA from Louisiana State University, where she studied ceramics and photography. For 20 years, she worked as an art educator, exhibit designer, and resident artist at the Louisiana Children’s Museum. She also taught in public and private schools, led art workshops throughout Louisiana, and served as the St. Tammany Artist in Residence for 10 years. After two decades of teaching, she turned her focus toward developing her own studio practice.

In 2023, Waller founded Clay Work.shop, a community clay studio in New Orleans, and later earned a Post-Baccalaureate in Ceramics from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She is a member of the Boston Nomad Collective and has participated in residencies including the International Artist Residency Exchange in St. Raphael, France, and the Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana.

Waller’s work has been exhibited nationally. Selected exhibitions include her 2026 solo exhibition in between at the Morean Center for Clay in St. Petersburg, Florida; The Importance of Being Nowhere at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, Louisiana; the Sixth LaGrange Southeast Regional at the LaGrange Art Museum in Georgia; and Shadow Piece(s): Chance-Based Responses in Clay at Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 2025, she received the NCECA KBH Merit Award at the NCECA National Juried Student Art Exhibition at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City.