In celebration of Women’s History Month, works by ceramicist Danielle Chutinthranond and filmmaker Lynn Loo were featured and discussed at Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart in March as part of its 2025 Jamie Tuttle Women in the Arts festival.

Chutinthranond makes ceramic dinnerware and housewares in her Chicago West Town studio. She is inspired by nature, classic Asian motifs, Chinatown, and restaurant and food culture. Chutinthranond focuses on making ceramic pieces that enhance the beauty and ritual of the table. She considers essentialism and minimalism as she creates durable, functional and beautiful pieces designed to be inherited through generations of families as treasured heirlooms. 

Those attending her March 14 presentation at Woodlands Academy learned about the history of tea ware and saw Chutinthranond demonstrate how she throws a Jian-style bowl on the pottery wheel.

Loo, a Singaporean moving-image artist currently based in London, is the first filmmaker to be featured during this annual Woodlands festival. Her interest in artistic filmmaking began in 1997. Using super-8, 16mm and digital video like a canvas, she experiments with time and space in moving images. Her works have been presented in galleries, arts and film festivals including Tate Gallery London, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Performa Biennale NYC, MMCA Seoul and Rotterdam Film Festival. Loo is an alumna of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of East Anglia in the UK.

During her March 17 virtual presentation at Woodlands Academy, Loo showed some of her videos (film and digital formats) and then discussed them. Included were “Unfinished Symphony,” her graduate film from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which received The Anne Louise Foundation Fellowship award, and “Forlorn,” a three-minute silent digital video shot from the roof of her former Chicago apartment, which she says was made in response to a life she had to leave behind.

Along with the knowledge about techniques and processes they gained, participating Woodlands Academy students enjoyed seeing these two professional female artists and learning about their lives, art and ideas. 

​The Women in the Arts event has been a Woodlands Academy tradition since 2005 when parents of two alumnae offered to sponsor exhibits by two visiting female artists. In addition to the exhibits of their work, each visiting artist made a presentation to students taking studio art and photography. Because this initial event was so well received by the visiting artists and Woodlands students alike, the donors offered to make Women in the Arts an annual event.

In 2021, this annual celebration of female artists was named in memory of Jamie Tuttle, a vital member of the school’s arts faculty for three decades who inspired generations of Woodlands students with her dedication to the arts. She also taught photography at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design for several years. Tuttle passed away Sept. 15, 2020, following a heroic battle with cancer.

In 2022, Woodlands Academy named a prominent display of student artwork in the school's front hallways in honor of Tuttle, who envisioned and then nurtured the display with her love of showcasing students' creations.

Tuttle says in her Artist Statement that after receiving her master's degree in fine arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she began teaching “with the hope of bringing the same passion and knowledge I received to my students.” The memorials created for her at Woodlands Academy are testimonials to her success in achieving that goal.

“For years, Jamie proudly took care of updating our student art pieces in the front gallery and also worked closely with the original Women in the Arts series to bring in talented women artists to share their crafts with our students,” said Associate Head of School for Student Life Christine Schmidt.

She and Tuttle began their Woodlands Academy careers in the fall of 1990. “Jamie had a tremendous impact on our students in developing their photography skills and, more importantly, she helped them develop a sense of seeing,” Schmidt added.