Leah Woods’s work with the New Hampshire Furniture Masters has brought her from galleries to prison classrooms.
Starting in January 2026, the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, will host Shaping Futures: The Prison Outreach Program of New Hampshire Furniture Masters, an exhibition featuring work by both students and instructors of the organization’s prison woodworking programs in Maine and New Hampshire. Leah Woods is one such instructor: In addition to teaching woodworking and furniture design at the University of New Hampshire, she taught woodworking at the New Hampshire Correctional Facility for Women from 2021 to 2025 (the program is on a temporary pause). Woods found the work deeply rewarding. “This program—and the exhibitions celebrating this work—allows us to be empathetic about this population and consider complex questions and policies around crime, punishment, redemption, and value,” she says. Read more about the exhibition in “Craft Happenings” from the Winter 2026 issue of American Craft, on sale now.
What is your role with the New Hampshire Furniture Masters’s Prison Outreach Program?
In October 2021, I began teaching woodworking at the New Hampshire Correctional Facility for Women in Concord. I initially inquired about the opportunity in 2009, but it took a class action lawsuit filed in 2012, the construction of a new women’s prison (which opened in 2018), and the disruptions of Covid before our classes began. I taught weekly woodworking classes for approximately two to ten women per class. They learned to carve spoons and to design and build boxes and stools. Almost every student has a specific person for whom they built their projects, whether family or friend.
A wood sculpture from Woods's 2025 series To Cultivate a Garden.
