OUR Team
The Papercraft Miracles team is made up of fabulous female artists, innovators and creators!
Learn more about our amazing team members below.
JANNA WILLOUGHBY-LOHR
owner & artist
Janna Willoughby-Lohr is the artist behind Papercraft Miracles LLC. Based in Buffalo, NY Janna is a poet, an artist, and a musician, having written her first poem at the youthful age of 5. She attended Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC, where she discovered the world of papermaking and bookbinding and was lucky enough to study under renowned book artist and author, Gwen Diehn. Janna created Papercraft Miracles LLC in 2004, as a way to make a living creatively, with a dedication to the craft of paper & book arts. She is thrilled that her creations have become a part of so many special moments, from weddings, to graduations, to births. As so much of the world is becoming screen-based and digital, Janna feels a calling to preserve and promote the physicality of book and paper arts. She loves bright colors, giggling and things that are small.
Lorrie Mattar
studio assistant & miracle worker
Life has never been a straight track for me. Curvilinear describes my hair, body and aura. I am in awe and one with the power of paper. I respect its ability to create and destroy. Imagination is my talent, devising better ways to do things is my skill and taming chaos is my superpower. My continuing mission: is to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where I have never gone before. I hope you’ll dance like no one is watching with me.
Sydney Strano
studio assistant & miracle worker
Creature of unknown origin
RUBY MERRITT
studio assistant & miracle worker
Ruby Merritt is a professional Visual Artist that merges environmental sciences, ecology and awareness for local natural spaces to be viewed as an art form in itself. Merritt considers herself as an Eco-Artist and has found a familiar niche in the ‘art and science’ biome, producing work that is process based, using earth cycles, such as rock and water cycles (evaporation), to manipulate and nurture her work. Conceptually, Merritt uses her work to share awareness for environmental issues and promote the pursuit of a sustainable planet.
Merritt received her BFA, concentrating in Drawing and Painting from the State University of New York at New Paltz & her Masters of Fine Art in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo.
BECKY GOLDBERG-PETTY
studio assistant & miracle worker
Becky is a human with a semblance of a brain and limbs that end in fingers. She uses that brain to shape the young minds of the students she educates at various academic institutions, and uses her fingers to shape flower petals in the studio. She is overtired and underfed at almost all times. She has several pieces of paper from institutions declaring her competency in a variety of things, and has used those competencies to generate artistic endeavors that have been produced on stages all over New York. She loves paper because of all of its consistencies and contradictions: it is strong and fragile, thin but deep, delicate and resilient, finite and everlasting. Becky once decided that she liked her spousal companion so much that they should make a small human that was half of each of them. She wrote this before her second cup of coffee and it shows.