Jane Bruce discusses what led to her teaching NYU classes for NYEGW. Oral history interview with Jane Bruce, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:36.

Jane Bruce: In the late seventies, 1979, I was—actually ‘78—I was sort of bored with what I was doing in London. And I had been over to the States a number of times, and I had a very good friend who lived in New York and in ‘79 I came over and he told me about this glass studio. So I went down and it was on Great Jones Street, it wasn’t even on Mulberry Street at that time. And I went down and I had a look at it. And it was pretty funky. And it was really funky compared to the studio that we had built two years before in London, which was really state of the art. And—I then went off to the GAS [Glass Art Society] conference at Corning [The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York]. And I met a man called Fred Tschida who taught neon, and I was interested in doing some neon. And another friend of mine ran the program at Tyler [Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania], Jon Clark. We’d been in graduate school together in London, and John introduced me to Fred. And Fred—I told him what I wanted to do with neon and Fred said, ‘Well come to Alfred [Alfred University, Alfred, New York].’ So instead of going to New York, I ended up in Alfred at the end of 1979, thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll go to New York for the weekend,’ not realizing, coming from England, that things can be rather far apart. And it was a good four to five hour car ride to New York City. Anyway, I stayed in Alfred for two years and then I needed a teaching job and I got a job in Ohio. So four years later I actually finally made it to New York. And by that time, the New York Experimental [New York Experimental Glass Workshop, now UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, New York] was on Mulberry Street and I had got a residency for six months. And when I got there Tina Yelle—it was 1985—and Tina asked me if I would teach the NYU class which James Harmon had been doing as well, and apparently they needed someone—so Tina said they needed someone with a master’s, and at the time I was actually the only person in the studio who actually had a master’s degree. So Jim Harmone [Harmon] and I started teaching. I sort of put the curriculum together and Jim did mostly the neon. And we’d do the crits together and then Jim eventually moved down to Philadelphia, so then I did the class on my own.