Mark Vander Heide hails from Holland, a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan. In 2009, he moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan to attend college but it wasn’t until his final year that he stumbled across the ceramics studio. After graduating with a bachelor’s in sociology, Mark moved to Pittsburgh, PA for a position in Union Project’s year long artist residency program. He stayed a few years more, spending time as an arts and early childhood educator and making pots out of several studios around town. In the fall of 2020, Mark moved to Detroit, MI to attend Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Mark enjoys making vessels of all sorts and, through them, seeks to explore the lived experiences of abundance, excess, consumption, and corpulence.