ZAC BANIK IS A SLAVIC-AMERICAN JEW WHO MAKES NEW THINGS OUT OF OLD THINGS. HE BELIEVES THAT DIFFERENCE IS WORTH CELEBRATING AND TRADITION IS WORTH REMEMBERING. HE WANTS TO BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER, REPAIR WHAT IS BROKEN AND PUT A SMUDGE ON EVERY CLEAN SURFACE.Zac was born in Cheltenham, England to American parents, whom he calls every day, and grew up in the Baltimore, Maryland metro area. He now lives in Portland, Oregon with his best friend and their three cats, where he creates art, finds clever solutions to problems, teaches craft and obsessively licks his teeth until his tongue bleeds and he has to sleep with a cotton ball in his mouth. Zac works in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, drawing, painting, textiles and narrative object design. He describes his aesthetic style as folk-modernism, combining the radical formal explorations of the early 1900’s with the deeply human signs, symbols and evidence of the creator’s hand preserved in folk craft. His interests lie in neo-Hasidism, solar punk, practical utopianism, Adlerian psychology, speculative ethnography and the social model of disability recovery. He has worked as a musician, an artist and designer, a teacher, a mental health worker, a sewist, an entrepreneur, a farm hand, a writer, an arts administrator and, briefly, in accounts receivable