Janet Koplos

Janet Koplos is the author of Contemporary Japanese Sculpture (1990) and What Makes a Potter: Traditional Pottery in America Today (2019) and is co-author of Makers: A History of American Studio Craft (2010) and Contemporary Basketry: New Directions from Contemporary Artists Worldwide (2025). She has contributed to other books, written many catalog essays, and published thousands of reviews in magazines and newspapers in the U.S., Japan, and Europe over the last 40 years, focusing on crafts and on American, Japanese and Dutch contemporary art. She was for 18 years a staff editor at Art in America magazine. She has taught at Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute in New York City, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. She received a National Endowment for the Arts critic’s grant early on and in 2015 was awarded an Art Writers Grant from the Warhol Foundation. She lives and works in New York City.