This week Miranda speaks with Heather Muise—a Canadian printmaker living and working in Greenville, North Carolina, where she’s a teaching professor at East Carolina University. Heather has taught printmaking across continents, including seven years in Dubai, and their conversation moves through all of those layers: place, language, culture, and how those experiences shape what we make.

They talk about Heather’s evolution from being a diehard lithographer—fast, loose, printing full editions in a single day—to falling deeply in love with the slower, more patient demands of etching. We get into her approach to color etching using a CMYK process on a single plate, and how that method connects back to her lithography brain in a way that just clicks.

But the heart of this episode is symbols—how they travel, how they hide meaning in plain sight, and how they can guide a viewer without spelling everything out. Heather shares how growing up bilingual, living abroad, and even experiencing functional illiteracy in a new writing system pushed her deeper into thinking about coded visual language—everything from carpets and borders-within-borders, to tattoo iconography, to dream logic.

Heather received first place in the SGCI Juried Members Exhibition, which is on view February 6 through March 28, 2026, at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in Lubbock, Texas. If you’re anywhere near there, go see the show.

Heather's Website

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This week Miranda speaks with Christie Tirado, a first-generation Mexican American artist, educator, and third-year MFA candidate at UW–Madison.

They talk about leaving a stable teaching career to go back to grad school, building community wherever you land, and how labor, in the field, in the kitchen, and in the studio, becomes an archive. Plus: the print gods, when to walk away after two messed-up prints, and why you should absolutely pair printmaking with salsa dancing whenever possible.

Christie's Website

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We are delighted to kick off our eighth season of the Hello, Print Friend podcast!

This week Miranda speaks with Shanna Strauss, a Tanzanian American mixed media artist and printmaker based in Oakland, California, and a faculty member at California College of the Arts. They talk about the winding road that led her back to art and how printmaking became not just a medium, but a community, a lineage, and a way of carrying history forward.

They get into Strauss' early inspiration from Charlotte O’Neal’s studio in Tanzania, what she learned from organizing and social justice work in Quebec, and how mentorship connects her to a larger printmaking family tree, all the way back through traditions of resistance print. As well as Beekeeping. Ancestors. And a new body of work Shauna’s beginning around Tanzanian kanga cloth.

Shanna Strauss's website

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