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Janice Lessman-Moss, professor of textiles, is retiring this summer after more than 40 years of service at the School of Art. Since being hired as a full-time faculty member in 1981, she has been the driving force behind the progress and innovation of textile arts education at ��ɫapp. A beloved professor, Lessman-Moss has touched many students’ lives by sharing her knowledge, skills, and love for weaving and textile history with those who have been fortunate enough to have her as a teacher and a mentor. 

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Throughout her decades-long career, she has shown her work locally, nationally, and internationally and has gained multiple prestigious recognitions for her art. Lessman-Moss has been awarded a number of Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council beginning in 1984, and received an Arts Midwest/National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Crafts. She won the prestigious Governor’s Award for the Arts in Ohio in 2016, the Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019, and a coveted United States Artists Fellowship also in 2019.

Lessman-Moss was recognized as a Distinguished Scholar at the university in 2000 and received a Distinguished Teaching Award in 2018. She is strongly committed to education in textile art and design and maintains a vibrant studio in the School of Art, working with textiles majors and minors from tangential fields such as Fashion, Architecture and Interior Design.  Students have an opportunity to learn a breadth of traditional weaving techniques and explore digital design and production using TC1 jacquard looms and Pointcarré® software.

As a member of the textile community, Lessman-Moss served as External Relations Director for the Textile Society of America from 2006-2010 and is a Founding Member of the Midwest Fiber Art Educators Network (MFAEN.)  She has also curated various exhibitions of textiles and pattern including: “The Poetics of Pattern,” Riffe Gallery, Columbus, Ohio; “Binary Fiction: Digital Weaving 2010,” the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery, University of Nebraska- Lincoln; and “Circles, Cycles and Structures,” Firelands Association of the Visual Arts (FAVA), Oberlin, Ohio, to name a few.

In 2021, she and her husband, professor emeritus Al Moss, established the for students pursuing an education in textiles at the School of Art. This scholarship, along with her forty-year guidance as a leader in her field, has cemented her legacy as one of Kent State’s most impactful professors.