Meet Our Team

Aidan Anne Frierson

(she/her)
Co-Founder, Manager of Papermill & Studio

Aidan Anne Frierson has nearly a decade of experience working with handmade paper. Since falling in love with the practice, it's been a dream of hers to open a Papermill and Studio where she can share her skills and love for the practice with others in her community. Papermaking, at its core, can be an inaccessible practice without the proper equipment and support —Aidan hopes to bridge the gap. She primarily works with Cotton, positing the material as "the reason Why We Are Here." Through handmade papermaking, she activates material by engaging with color, texture, size, pattern and form. She honors history as a material by embedding personal and cultural ephemera in relationship with cellulose.

Frierson is also the Executive Director of the North American Hand Papermakers organization. Her public programming, education work, and cultural practice has shown up collaboratively in spaces such as: Newberry Library, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Public Schools, Chicago Park District, Chicago Torture Justice Center, Chicago Art Department, Marwen, Dieu Donné, Hook Pottery & Paper, Smart Museum of Art, ACRE Residency and Penland School of Craft. In 2025, she received her Masters of Fine Arts degree in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she and her co-founder, Dave King, first met.

Dave King

(he/him)
Co-Founder, Manager of Finance & Operations

Dave King brings over 30 years of hands-on experience from his family's HVAC and sheet metal business, where he was immersed in material, form, and function from a young age. His career as a tradesman and craftsman has always been intertwined with artistic exploration-returning again and again to creative practices grounded in process and materiality.

Dave is a Sculptor, Designer and Artist working primarily with Abaca and Flax pulp to create 3-Dimensional forms. Dave constructs large handmade sheets using custom-built deckle boxes. His sculptural work reflects a deep connection to natural materials and industrial textures-rust, found objects, light, and shadow. He gravitates toward Abaca skin and Rattan fiber, forming life-size garments such as hats, dresses, and accessories that straddle the line between wearability and sculpture. In 2025, Dave received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he and his co-founder, Aidan Anne Frierson, first met.

Ayah Yusuf Abdulkadir

(they/them)
Research & Studio Fellow

Ayah Yusuf Abdulkadir is a child of immigrants born away from their historical homeland. Removed from cultural context and unable to assimilate, they struggle to pull together traces of intangible inheritance in order to situate themselves in a society that they can only describe as foreign. Using their work as the conduit for speculation, they juggle the impacts of memory, lineage, heritage, and time in a desperate attempt to answer the question: "Stripped to the bone, who am I?"

They work primarily with photography, printmaking, bookmaking, and other paper-based mediums – often within the realms of the domestic, the familiar, or the quotidian. They graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2025.

Izabelle Brandli

(she/her)
Education & Studio Intern

Izabelle Brandli is a Papermaker, Weaver, and Printmaker currently living in Chicago IL. Growing up in the midwest, specifically the Great Lake region, it heavily influences the themes within her practice- culturally and from the environment. Using her background of scientific illustration to piece patterns from insects, birds, and plants together like quitting patterning to create her portal work. These portals represent home– to create explorations of self in relation to nature. Brandli attended The School Of The Art Institute of Chicago where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with emphasis on Fiber Arts & Material Studies and Environmental Arts.

Brandli is the current Education & Studio Intern at Chicago Pulp and serves as the Co-Vice President of Communications for the North American Hand Papermakers organization.