Jodi Kurtz-Tseng

With a BA in art history and a Masters degree in organizational leadership, Jodi has spent the last three years designing furniture professionally for Kurtz + Atkins Design Company. K+A was born as a partnership, combining Jodi’s innate design talents with Bryan Atkin’s workshop know-how, but with the ultimate goal of establishing for Jodi a fully self-sustaining woodworking business with a focus on unique, one-of-a-kind furniture from reclaimed materials. Before leaving Minneapolis for Washington, Jodi revisited her North Dakotan roots with her now wife, Wan-Ling. Hillsboro, North Dakota is home to a small population of about fifteen hundred people, and in this small-town setting, Jodi envisioned a centerpiece for their new home. Salvaging wood from a one-hundred-year-old barn on her childhood farm, Jodi constructed her first farm table from wood with history.

Again situated on a farm, this time in the greater Washington, DC area, Jodi utilizes the seven-acre property to stimulate the artistic process. On the site sits a tiny house cabin, an intimate space where Jodi meets with clients to discuss projects, complete with a Do-It-Yourself woodworkers library. The vintage volumes are shelved on K+A-designed floating shelves made from century-old wood once occupying a Euclid Avenue row-home.

Additional recent projects include a seven-foot work station, tailor station, and rolling suit-racks for Bindle & Keep – to be featured in an upcoming HBO documentary, Three Suits, produced by Lena Dunham —fourteen table tops for Café Nola in Historic downtown Frederick, Maryland, and an eight-foot conference table and sixteen desks for a private security company. Jodi is particularly proud of her working relationship with James Kastner of Coldwell Banker and Bonny Dempsey of MAD Properties – a developing firm who buys and restores Washington row-homes.