Ed Kirshner of Oakland, California was born in New York City in 1940. He studied architecture and sculpture at Cornell University, the University of California at Berkeley and the Oskar Kokoschka School of Vision in Austria. After thirty years of developing and financing affordable housing, he returned to study art at the California College of the Arts in Oakland as well as at Pilchuck and Corning glass schools and Northlands Creative Glass in Scotland. His glass and gas plasma sculptures have been exhibited throughout the U.S. as well as in Taiwan, Japan, Australia, Austria, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Turkey. His work, “Cone of Chaos”, was a Corning Glass selection in 2000 and is included in Corning’s recent book “25 Years of New Glass Review.” His plasma sculptures are in the permanent collections of the di Rosa Fine Arts Preserve in Napa, California, and the Swiss Science Center, Technorama, near Zurich. Ed has taught glass and gas plasma workshops in the U.S. as well as in Asia and Europe and is on the faculty of The Crucible Fire Arts School in Oakland and the Glass Furnace in Turkey. He is also a Trustee and the Treasurer of the Museum of Neon Art (MONA) in Los Angeles.