Hi, I'm Robin Dreyer. I live with my wife, Tammy, in a little house in the South Toe Valley of Yancey County, North Carolina surrounded by interesting people and the incredibly beautiful landscapes of Western North Carolina (notably the imposing wall of the Black Mountains, just to the west).
I work as the communications manager at Penland School of Craft. In addition to managing publications and supervising digital media, I am the school photographer. I have had a long love affair with photographs and cameras. Although my work for the school is all digital photography (the cameras have gotten so good!), I maintain a darkroom at home and am interested in a variety of photographic processes.
In addition to countless Penland publications, my photographs have appeared in magazines, including American Craft, American Style, FiberArts, Our State, Pinhole Journal, ReadyMade, Garden & Gun, Mohawk Maker Quarterly, and books published by Lark Books and Time-Life Books.
I've had work in a number of exhibitions in venues that include Asheville Art Museum (NC), Center for Alternative Photography (NYC), Asheville Area Arts Council (NC), Terminus Building (Atlanta), North Carolina Art Museum, Bull City Art Collective (NC), and Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art. I'm thrilled to have one of my daguerreotypes in the collection of the Asheville Art Museum.
I have taught three photo workshops at Penland School, plus a number of pinhole photography workshops for young people of various ages. I'll be teaching at Penland again in the summer of 2023 with my friend Jeff Goodman of Appalachian State University. Jeff is one of the best teachers I know, and I'm excited that we'll be working together.
In addition to photography, I do quite a bit of writing--for work and otherwise. I am a bicycle enthusiast, Tammy and I are food buyers for our neighborhood food co-op, I love to bake bread and cook, I mess around in a vegetable garden, I manage a weekly community email newsletter, I try to keep in touch with our son, our two daughters-in-law, and our two grandchildren, and I travel up to Mount Mitchell State Park three or four times a month to collect rainwater samples for the National Atmospheric Deposition Program.
