Kristy Higby • Bio
Kristy Higby
Higby received her bachelor degree in studio art from the University of South Carolina. She has taught artists’ books, drawing, digital graphic arts and digital video since 1977. She and her husband were art instructors at Mercersburg Academy, Mercersburg, PA from 1991-2014.
She has attended numerous workshops at the International Film and Photography Workshops in Rockport, Maine; the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and Penland School of Crafts in Penland, N.C.
W.W. Norton chose the short documentary, Flag Day, for inclusion in two Norton Sociology textbooks DVD, Essentials of Sociology and The Real World: Introduction to Sociology. “The purpose of our sociology textbooks is to provide college students with a sociological awareness with which to analyze situations in our modern world. We have selected your film because it addresses an important current issue from an intelligent and sociological point of view.”
Flag Day received an Honorable Mention at the 2005 Silverdocs Film Festival (now AFI Docs). Her short documentary, Bowl Digger, was awarded a Director’s Choice award at the 2007 Black Maria Film Festival and the Best Documentary award at the 2007 Dam Short Film Festival in Boulder City, Nevada. It was juried into the three-month-long Make it New exhibition at the Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC, during the summer of 2007 and toured with the 2007-2008 Short Circuit Traveling Film Festival Sponsored by the Southern Arts Federation. Her most recent film, The Other Brother, was also her first feature-length documentary. The National Gallery of Art added the DVD to its viewing library of art films. It also screened at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago in 2015 and numerous art galleries and museums throughout the southeast.
Higby and her husband, Mark Flowers, a painter, had a two-person exhibit, at the Goodall Gallery in Columbia College, Columbia, SC and another two-person exhibition, Sequences and Events, at the Art Museum of Myrtle Beach, SC.
Her artists’ books were included in the South Arts (Southern Arts Federation) Traveling Show, American Masterpiece Craft Exhibition, and an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts. This exhibit opened in New Orleans in September 2007 and toured throughout the Southeast for three years. Tradition/Innovation: American Masterpieces of Southern Craft and Traditional Art featured 48 artworks created by masters living and working in the South today. Two of her artists’ books were included in the upcoming South Carolina Arts Commission Fellows Exhibition held at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, SC in May 2018.
Most recently, eight pieces of her small metal works were juried into the 5th Annual Mint Gallery National Juried Exhibition for Emerging Artists, Interrupted, in Atlanta, Georgia, this past March 2018. Artist Jiha Moon juried the exhibition. They were also juried into the upcoming Celebrating American Craft – Southern Style Exhibition to be held in the Sarratt Gallery at Vanderbilt University in Nashville in Fall 2018.
Kristy and her husband now live and work out of their studio, Mountain Tea Studios, in Asheville, NC.