Warren MacKenzie

Born in 1924 in Kansas City, Missouri. In all aspects of his career, Warren MacKenzie has championed the functional potter. In his prolific body of work, Mackenzie uses form, color, and surface to create striking, expressive functional pottery. In the 1940s, MacKenzie attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, then he and his wife Alix became the first American apprentices in the studio of Bernard Leach in Cornwall, England, in 1949. When they returned to the United States in 1953, they established a pottery in Stillwater, Minnesota, where Warren and Alix collaborated until her death in 1962. Warren MacKenzie is a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, where he began teaching in 1954. MacKenzie has served as president of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts as well as a panelist for policy and planning for the National Endowment for the Arts. He has given extensive workshops and lectures across the United States, and his work is widely exhibited in major collections around the world. Warren MacKenzie lives with his wife Nancy, a fiber artist, in Stillwater, Minnesota, where he maintains a studio. He received the American Craft Council’s Gold Medal in 1998.