The Ceramics Professor, the Student Strategist, and the Account That Went Global

June 10, 2026By Jordan J. Phelan '19

Adjunct Professor of Visual Arts Denis Leonti and junior Graphic Design major Juliet Garcia-Baez outside the Gooding Avenue ceramics studio, where Saturday filming sessions have become part of the rhythm of teaching, making, and sharing ceramics beyond Bristol.

BRISTOL, R.I. - Denis Leonti did not set out to become an influencer. After decades of working with clay and teaching ceramics at Roger Williams University, Leonti had begun seeing pottery videos circulate online that, to him, missed the mark. Some were beautiful. Some were popular. But too many, he thought, offered incomplete instruction or techniques that could lead beginners in the wrong direction.

"I could do that so easily," Leonti remembered thinking.

He knew he could offer something different - practical, generous, rooted in more than 50 years of experience. What he did not know was how to translate that knowledge into the language of Instagram and TikTok.

"I'm not technology savvy," said Leonti, an Adjunct Professor of Visual Arts.

That is where Juliet Garcia-Baez came in.

Juliet Garcia-Baez guides Denis Leonti through a Saturday video shoot at the clay studio on Gooding Avenue in Bristol, offering marketing insight and production direction from behind her tablet.

A junior Graphic Design major with minors in Marketing and Visual Arts from Cranston, R.I., Garcia-Baez began working with Leonti in November after the two were connected through RWU's School of Humanities, Arts, and Education.

Soon, the work moved into Leonti's clay studio on Gooding Avenue in Bristol, a compact, clay-dusted space where student pieces line the shelves, wheels sit ready for class, and the materials of a working studio became the raw material for a new kind of digital classroom.

At the time, Leonti's Instagram account had 78 followers. Within months, it has grown to more than 16,000, with videos reaching viewers around the world and drawing questions from potters across countries and continents.

The story is not simply that a ceramics professor went viral. It is that a faculty member with deep expertise and a student with digital fluency found a powerful combination: clay and camera, teaching and strategy, ancient craft and new-world reach.

The Process Becomes the Story

Before the partnership began, Leonti's Instagram account showed what many artists' accounts show: finished pieces.

Garcia-Baez saw that the real story came earlier.

"The content that Denis was posting before were his finished pieces, the results of his process," Garcia-Baez said. "What we post now is the process and the result. People are getting that added value of seeing and learning how pieces are made."

From above, Leonti works at the wheel while filming a ceramics lesson, shaping clay into a vessel for his growing online audience.

That shift changed everything. Instead of presenting pottery as a finished object, the account began inviting viewers into the studio: the centering of clay, the shaping of a vessel, the decisions made in real time, the occasional break, collapse, or surprise.

It is not overly polished. That is the point.

Garcia-Baez wanted the videos to feel true to Leonti - direct, funny, knowledgeable, and unbothered by perfection. If something breaks, it stays part of the story. If a piece changes direction, the audience sees why. If Leonti starts explaining a technique, the camera stays with him long enough for viewers to learn.

"What I wanted for him was more realness," Garcia-Baez said. "If something breaks, it breaks. If something doesn't go the way it's supposed to go, it doesn't go the way it was supposed to go."

That authenticity has become part of the account's appeal. Viewers have responded not only to what Leonti teaches, but how he teaches it: with ease, humor, and the confidence of someone who has spent a lifetime learning from the material.

For Leonti, that confidence is not performance. It is habit.

"I can't not talk about it," he said. "It's just so important to me that I can't give enough information and share my enthusiasm and what it's done for me and my life."

One video became the clearest example. In it, Leonti demonstrates how to center eight pounds of clay - a threshold that can intimidate newer potters and challenge more experienced ones. Garcia-Baez edited the video with a sharp opening hook, beginning with the result before moving into the lesson.

"So people already know what the video is going to be about," Garcia-Baez said.

The topic was practical. The delivery was calm. The instruction was useful. The video brought in 11,516 new followers, was saved 11,000 times, and generated four straight days of notifications.

For beginners, it answered a fundamental question. For experienced potters, it clarified a difficult skill. For Leonti, it confirmed what he had suspected: there was a real appetite for ceramics instruction that was both accessible and grounded in experience.

The comments began to read less like reactions to a viral video and more like notes from a classroom. One viewer wrote, "I don't even need to look at any of your other videos to know I want to follow your channel. You just taught centering the same as my instructor."

Another commenter, who described themselves as a full-time potter of more than 50 years, thanked Leonti for countering some of the poor instruction circulating online. "No wonder so many people struggle," the commenter wrote. "It's just a shame."

Others treated the video as something to study.

"Watching this from the UK. This was so informative with a few light bulb moments for me. I'm going to watch it again and take notes! Thank you so much for being so generous with your knowledge." - Michelle, on Instagram

And the instruction traveled beyond individual viewers. One commenter, preparing to teach their first beginner class, wrote, "Thank you for giving tips that I will use and refer to when helping my students throw for their first."

For Leonti, that is where good teaching begins: not in making the work seem impressive, but in making it feel possible.

"People complicate things too much," Leonti said. "And I'm like, 'Look, you just do this, this, and this.'"

In the video, he explained not only what to do with the clay but also what to do with the body - how to use movement, posture, pressure, and leverage to make the work easier and more sustainable.

"People say, 'Oh, using the legs. Oh, that's a game changer,'" Leonti said.

The lesson traveled, and nearly 100 videos later, Leonti's teaching is still finding new students far beyond the studio.

Faculty Expertise, Student Strategy

Their collaboration has found its rhythm in a clear exchange of expertise, with each trusting the other to lead where they know best.

Leonti brings the ceramics. Garcia-Baez brings the strategy.

He thinks about what people need to learn: how to use the body at the wheel, how to avoid common mistakes, how to preserve the integrity of the material, how to fix what seems broken, how to develop a style that is not copied from someone else. She thinks about how people will encounter those lessons on a screen: the first few seconds, the pacing, the cuts, the captions, the analytics, the visual language.

"We never go in with a script," Garcia-Baez said. "Denis knows about ceramics, and I know about video. So that's the best thing ever."

But the work is not casual.

By Friday, Garcia-Baez is studying what is resonating in the ceramics community, reviewing comments and performance, and thinking about trends that could be adapted to Leonti's style. On Saturdays, they arrive with ideas: one centered on Leonti's teaching, others shaped around trends or quick clips that can be posted the same day. After filming, the footage is organized, edited, reviewed, and scheduled for the week ahead, with posts typically going out at 6 p.m.

They now post nearly every day except Sundays. Live videos, once held every Saturday, have become more occasional - a special monthly opportunity for viewers to interact with Leonti in real time.

The process is strategic, but not scripted. That distinction matters to Garcia-Baez.

She has learned that translating someone else's expertise into digital content requires more than following trends. It requires listening closely enough to preserve what makes that person worth watching in the first place.

"Finding a way to show someone's essence and style is the key to bringing a community together."

That philosophy shapes the account. The editing has structure - hooks, yellow text, sound effects, pacing - but the videos still feel like Denis. He jokes. He teaches. He changes direction. He lets mistakes remain visible. Garcia-Baez's job is not to make him perform for the internet, but to help the internet understand why people already respond to him in the studio.

"I know what I want to do, but she knows how to do it technically, with video and editing," Leonti said. "It's been a great working process."

That translation is central to Garcia-Baez's education at RWU. As a Graphic Design major and Marketing and Visual Arts double minor, she is learning how to take an idea, a voice, a style, or a message and make it visible to an audience. With Leonti's account, that work has become immediate and measurable.

"Graphic design is about listening to what someone wants to communicate and finding a way to translate that visually, through shapes, colors, and typography," Garcia-Baez said. "I feel like it's the same way for Denis."

Garcia-Baez reflects on the strategy, editing, and audience engagement lessons she has developed through her work with Leonti over the past several months.

Her RWU professors have watched those creative instincts develop in the classroom.

Denielle Emans, Associate Professor of Graphic Design and Graphic Design Program Coordinator, has seen Garcia-Baez develop that creative perspective since first meeting her and her family at Accepted Students Days. Even before beginning at RWU, Emans said, Garcia-Baez was asking thoughtful questions about representation, diversity, entrepreneurship, and how to build a creative career with intention.

"One of Juliet's greatest strengths is her ability to connect visual storytelling with authenticity," Emans said. "She understands how to make creative work feel approachable, engaging, warm, and human, which is such an important skill in today's media landscape."

Emans said Garcia-Baez has continued developing those skills through coursework in graphic design, branding, social media strategy, and her work with the Design Collective, where she has documented the annual Graphic Design Senior Showcase for the past two years.

"What impresses me most is that this growth feels authentic to both Professor Leonti and his teaching practice," Emans said. "Juliet clearly understands that a successful social media strategy is not just about chasing trends or numbers, but about creating content that feels real, visually compelling, and genuinely connected to its audience."

In the Mario J. Gabelli School of Business, Garcia-Baez's ability to pair creativity with audience awareness also stood out. Duygu Akdevelioglu, Associate Professor of Marketing, said Garcia-Baez distinguished herself in her Digital Marketing class by thinking beyond assignments and toward how marketing can build meaningful connections with audiences.

"Juliet has a natural ability to understand people," Akdevelioglu said. "She pays attention to tone, visuals, storytelling, and audience response, which are all essential in digital marketing."

In Garcia-Baez's work with Leonti, Akdevelioglu sees a student applying those skills in a professional setting: audience awareness, brand voice, visual storytelling, content planning, and engagement strategy.

"Growing an Instagram presence from 78 followers to more than 16,000 is not just a numbers story. It reflects strategy, consistency, audience understanding, creative storytelling, and the ability to recognize what makes someone's work meaningful to others."

Garcia-Baez also brings entrepreneurial experience of her own. She co-founded JW Studios, a photography and videography business, with her partner, Wilder, and has been editing video since childhood.

Through JW Studios, Garcia-Baez and Wilder approach the work as both documentation and storytelling. While Leonti shapes ceramic pieces by hand, JW Studios captures the moments around that process - the movement, texture, instruction, humor, and experimentation that help viewers understand not only what he makes, but how and why he makes it.

Wilder, a partner in JW Studios, carefully places one of Leonti's finished works inside a light box, preparing to photograph the piece for online, catalog, and promotional use.

For Wilder, the collaboration has become a creative exchange between craft and camera, blending Leonti's handmade work with JW Studios' visual storytelling.

"Denis is passionate about crafting ceramic pieces, shaping unique ideas with his own hands," Wilder said. "JW Studios is dedicated to capturing those moments and processes through photography and video, immortalizing the essence of art and creativity."

Working with Leonti, Wilder said, has reinforced the value of learning, adaptation, and creative collaboration.

"Working with Denis and observing and listening to him serves as a clear reminder that age does not define your limits. With dedication and passion, it is always possible to achieve whatever you set your mind to."

At RWU, Garcia-Baez said, experiences such as open houses, Accepted Students Days, and work as an Orientation Advisor and in the Design Collective have helped her build the confidence to communicate, direct, problem-solve, and work with clients.

"This experience shows me that I know how to take what I have learned into the real work environment," Garcia-Baez said.

A commuter student and first-generation college student, Garcia-Baez said she has tried to use every opportunity available to her at RWU - not only to build her own future, but to honor the people behind her.

"When I come to campus, I don't only bring myself, but I bring my whole family," Garcia-Baez said. "Being the first in college is a huge success for us, so everything I do is with them in mind."

Leonti sees that drive clearly.

"Juliet is wise beyond her years. For a student, her skills and her abilities, it's like working with a seasoned professional."

He describes their partnership as easygoing but serious, playful but purposeful. They laugh often. They film without ego. They trust each other's expertise.

"She has a plan all the time," Leonti said. "She's very creative, and that's how we're able to work together and off of each other."

A Studio Without Walls

On Saturdays, Leonti and Garcia-Baez film at the clay studio on Gooding Avenue in Bristol, a clay-dusted, street-level space where the evidence of making is everywhere. Student work fills the shelves. Glaze tests cluster near finished pieces. Tools, sponges, bags of clay, and reclaimed scraps sit within reach. The wheels are not props for the camera, but the same wheels where RWU students learn to center, pull, shape, collapse, repair, and begin again.

High on the studio's tallest shelf rests a vase that might be missed among the dozens of others if not for the words etched into its surface: "I was born to do this." Created by senior Sofie Vangel, the piece reads almost like a quiet thesis for the room below, where discovery, discipline, and self-expression take shape in clay.

For Vangel, an Environmental Science major with minors in Visual Arts and Biology from Charlton, Mass., the words are personal. She remembers beginning with "small wobbly pots" and, with Leonti's guidance, eventually learning to throw larger forms that opened new possibilities in her work.

"I feel ceramics is something I was put here to do," Vangel said. "I feel the same way about Denis."

Ceramics, she said, has also taught her patience.

"Denis is always harping on me that mistakes are not a bad thing but a learning opportunity," Vangel said.

For Leonti, the studio has always been built on exchange. When he gives an assignment, he often completes it alongside his students, watching as their ideas open new possibilities in his own work. A glaze combination he had not considered. A variation on a form. A new way of solving a problem.

"The thing that I really enjoy the most is the interaction between the students and me," Leonti said. "I'm learning through my students, as well as my students learning through me. It's always nice to be able to have that exchange of ideas."

Leonti works with a student at the wheel, using a level atop a mound of clay to demonstrate precision, preparation, and technique.

That exchange is physical, constant, and generous. Students learn by watching him. He learns by watching them. Together, they move through thousands of pounds of clay each semester - often between 3,000 and 5,000 pounds - with Leonti reconditioning scraps so the material can be used again.

"I always use reconditioned clay," Leonti said. "I never use clay straight out of the bag because it has imperfections. It's like wine. It gets better with age."

The philosophy is practical, but it is also personal. Clay, to Leonti, is something to be respected, not rushed. It carries the marks of touch, pressure, hesitation, mood, and attention. In class, he can often tell what kind of day a student is having by the way they approach the wheel.

That is part of what makes his teaching so animated online. He is not performing expertise so much as extending what he already does in the classroom: demonstrating, correcting, encouraging, adjusting, and making room for mistakes.

"You can be taught how to make something, but to fix it, that's a whole other process," Leonti said. "It's more important that you learn how to fix things than make things."

His students describe that approach as transformative.

Leonti and a student examine a newly made mug with an ornate handle as he shares feedback, experience, and technical insight.

For Rese Mulkey, a sophomore Criminal Justice major from Stratton, Vt., Leonti's mentorship changed not only how she works with clay but also how she sees herself as an artist.

"Denis' encouragement and mentorship have completely changed the way I view myself and my own work within the studio," Mulkey said. "Denis has this gift of knowing just what to do and say to lift up each individual student, helping them achieve their full individual and unique potential."

That encouragement, she said, creates a studio where students feel able to move beyond familiar habits and take creative risks.

"Denis is someone who encourages individuality and risk-taking, helping every student move out of recurring habits, letting them all expand their work and develop a unique style of their own," Mulkey said.

For Mimi Roddick, a sophomore Business Management major and Entrepreneurship minor from Nashville, Tenn., the clay studio became more than a class. It became part of why she stayed connected to RWU. Through Leonti's encouragement, Roddick discovered a love of ceramics, started Southern Belle Ceramics, and sold her work at Hawk on the Block before being invited to serve as a vendor at the Mount Hope Artisan Fair in Bristol.

"Without Denis pushing me in the right direction, none of this would have been possible," Roddick said.

Mia Bouchier '25, who now lives in New York and teaches ceramics herself, said Leonti's influence has carried directly into her own classroom. One of his lessons stayed with her most clearly: if a piece is not working, learn from it and begin again.

"Not getting attached to your pieces is something I think people should learn early on in their pottery classes," Bouchier said.

Now, as a teacher, Bouchier said she brings Leonti's humor and ease into her own classes, helping students move past insecurity and keep working.

"In ceramics, it's really easy to get insecure about what you make when you start out, and Denis never made me feel that way, even when my pieces were truly awful. So I make sure to bring those same vibes to my classes."

He knows the feeling of discovery because ceramics first gave it to him.

Growing up as the youngest of five, Leonti was quiet and introverted. In an artist statement, he has written that high school changed his life by introducing him to ceramics, a place where he was supported, encouraged, and recognized for his talent. His teacher, Betsy Zimmerman, became an early source of confidence, helping him see a future in a material that would shape the rest of his life.

"From the day I walked into the ceramics room in high school and I saw somebody doing this, it was like, this is what you are going to do for the rest of your life," Leonti said.

In an earlier photo, Denis Leonti shapes clay at the wheel.

He followed that path through Rhode Island College, graduate study at Rhode Island School of Design, years of production pottery, gallery work, family, loss, return, and decades of teaching. It was not easy, he said. He worked multiple jobs, raised a family, and stayed focused on the material that had first caught him as a teenager.

In his catalog statement, Leonti describes ceramics as a relationship - one that gave back to him and helped him build confidence, trust, and purpose. Clay followed him through nearly every chapter of his life, including the death of his first wife, Michele, when art making became both an escape and a way of surviving. Years later, teaching and clay helped draw him back.

Today, his vessels often begin as traditional forms before being altered, textured, elevated, and embellished. He has described them as symbolic human forms - clay variations of himself, people he loves, and people he meets. When displayed together, they become a kind of community: acknowledged, appreciated, and healed.

That sense of community now extends beyond the studio.

Viewers tune in from across the country and around the world. Some ask how to fix a specific problem. Some want to know why Leonti positions his hands a certain way. Some come for the instruction and stay for the atmosphere.

For Garcia-Baez, the scale of that reach became clear when viewers began treating the comment section like a classroom.

"I noticed it when people in the comments were asking him so many questions as if it were a classroom," Garcia-Baez said. "People with years of experience are learning from him, and new people getting into ceramics are learning from him, too."

During live sessions, viewers have joined from Argentina, Spain, the Netherlands, and beyond. One person thanked them and said good night because it was midnight in Japan. Others return regularly, watching Leonti work in real time and asking questions as he shapes each piece.

For Leonti, the global reach still feels astonishing.

"Back in the day, when I was a younger artist, if you wanted to show your work, you'd have to get a gallery, have to get invitations, hope the weather is good, and you might get a handful of people," Leonti said. "Now it's like, wow, there's thousands."

The attention has been surprising, but also validating.

"I wanted to leave something behind, and I feel like now I have. I'm 72 years old. I never imagined I would have 16,000 people following me and having videos that so many people are looking at. What more can I ask for?"

Still, the center of the work has not changed. Leonti does not see the platform as a pursuit of fame. He sees it as another way to teach, to share what he has learned, and to honor one of the oldest crafts on the planet.

"I probably haven't taught as many kids in 50 years as I've had people seeing stuff on the internet," Leonti said. "It's a very valuable tool."

Leonti smiles as he reflects on the experience, framed by wheeled trays holding student and studio works ready for the kiln.

At RWU, the physical studio has its own reach. Students bring friends. Passersby look through the windows. People from the surrounding Bristol community stop in and ask about classes. Leonti said that if the lights are on, people are welcome to come in, look around, and see what is happening.

The account has magnified that same invitation.

It has made a local studio visible to a global audience. It has given a student a real-world creative platform for her design, marketing, and video skills. It has given a professor a new way to share a lifetime of knowledge. And it has shown what can happen when opportunity is recognized and acted on - when art, teaching, strategy, entrepreneurship, and technology meet in one working studio.

For Garcia-Baez, that is the larger lesson.

"College has so much to offer, but you have to be prepared to take those opportunities before you graduate," she said.

From left, Wilder, Denis Leonti, and Juliet Garcia-Baez stand outside the clay studio on Gooding Avenue in Bristol, where their collaboration has helped bring Leonti's teaching to a global audience.

For Leonti, it is simpler and deeper.

"This isn't work. This isn't a job," he said. "This is my calling."

And so, on Saturdays, the camera keeps rolling. The clay keeps turning. A student watches the frame. A professor follows the form. Somewhere, someone opens a video and learns what to do next.