About Chandra
Chandra DeBuse is a Kansas City–based ceramic artist who celebrates overgrown gardens and overlooked creatures on colorful, patterned pottery. Working primarily in porcelain, DeBuse combines wheel throwing and handbuilding with drawing, inlay, sgraffito, low relief, and soft translucent glaze color to create objects where surface, form and use intersect. She creates her surfaces primarily through an inlay technique where hand-drawn imagery is incised with a sharp knife through soft porcelain, filled with pigmented liquid clay (underglaze) and wiped back to reveal fine lines. After a first firing, Chandra colors her line drawings with translucent glaze before a second firing to approximately 2230 Fahrenheit. Chandra’s work has been described as “silky smooth” and “a joy to hold and use.” Her handmade functional pottery creates opportunities for discovery, play, and connection in everyday rituals of life.
DeBuse received her MFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Ceramics from the University of Florida in 2010, following post-baccalaureate study in ceramics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and an undergraduate degree in Psychology at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Her professional development has included year- long residencies at the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, FL and at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN. She has participated in Artist-Invite-Artist residency programs at Red Lodge Clay Center (MT) and at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (ME). She is a founding member of the Kansas City Urban Potters collective.
Her work has received national recognition, including the 2012 NCECA Emerging Artist Award and monetary award supported by the Windgate Charitable Foundation, as well as recognition as an Emerging Artist by Ceramics Monthly. In 2017 with Kansas City Urban Potters she was the co-recipient of a Rocket Grant from Charlotte Street Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Spencer Museum of Art.
DeBuse's work has been exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions, including a 2025 group exhibition at the National Museum of Toys and Miniatures, a 2021 solo exhibition at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia and exhibitions at Red Lodge Clay Center, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Baltimore Clayworks, AKAR, Northern Clay Center, The Art School at Old Church in Demarest, NJ and other contemporary craft institutions. She was represented at the SOFA Expo 2012 in Chicago where she also delivered a lecture. Her work and ideas have been published in Ceramics Monthly, Pottery Making Illustrated, and Studio Potter, and her techniques and work have been included in books addressing ceramic surface design, handbuilding, wheel throwing, glaze, and firing.
As an educator and presenter, DeBuse has led more than sixty workshops at universities, art centers, and craft schools in the United States, Canada and Europe. She has presented at the NCECA Conference, the Utilitarian Clay Symposium at Arrowmont, the Alabama Clay Conference, the Functional Ceramics Workshop, the Skopelos Foundation for the Arts in Greece, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Santa Fe Clay, the Morean Workshop Space, and many other venues. She served as an adjunct instructor in Ceramics at the University of Central Missouri and in Drawing, Art Appreciation and Ceramics at Gulf Coast State College.
In 2027 Chandra will be presenting a workshop at Harvard University Ceramics, at the Women Working in Clay Symposium at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA and in October she will be leading a 2-week workshop at Monte Castello Academy in Umbria, Italy.