In case you’re wondering who’s going to choose the winning entrants among our many Furniture Flip participants, here’s a closer look at the 2018 Furniture Flip judges’ panel. And, bonus for us: This year’s event also features a silent and live auction, with celebrity auctioneer Sam Albert of 101.7 FM!

Auctioneer Sam Albert
Sam Albert has been a fan of the radio station 101.7FM long before she had the privilege of working there. Before moving to Bend, she was a proud member of The Second City in Chicago for close to 10 years. She also lived and worked (but mostly didn’t work) in film and television in Los Angeles.

You can see her yelling at the hunky Matt Damon in The Informant and getting yelled at by the hunky Ving Rhames in The Goods.

Central Oregon remains Albert’s favorite place to live, and she can’t think of a better soundtrack for this region than 101.7. In other news, Sam has an irrational fear of crickets, wants to learn to drive stick shift and never litters.

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And here’s a little more info about our esteemed panel of judges:

 Marianne Fellner
Marianne Fellner grew up in Portland with a lifelong passion for creating and transforming objects into art. “I started collecting architectural remnants along the side of the road in Portland when some of the old inner-city neighborhoods were razed in the late ’70s,” she says. “One day, there would be a row of houses, and the next there would be heaps of rubble littered with stained-glass windows and beautiful, Victorian ornamental pieces of trim and built-ins. My collecting and upcycling began with preservation in mind. It just felt wrong to see all of that fine craftsmanship crushed and sent to a landfill.”

Marianne’s love of old homes soon motivated her to buy a 1920 inner-Portland fixer house to transform; she’s been working on one house after another ever since. Marianne has been a ReStore customer since moving to Central Oregon in 2003. “The ReStore has long been a tremendous resource for creative remodelers. Whatever I need is there like magic. I’ve transformed multiple properties with ReStore materials.”

Marianne has worked in many areas of design, beginning in leather fashion, then moving on to designing graphics, exhibits, landscapes and even floral design before returning to work in leather garments. For 14 years she owned Stellar Ranch, a gallery in Tumalo, where she designed custom leather riding chaps, chinks and leather accessories, and renovated furniture with leather. A constant theme is combining beauty and function to create art. Marianne’s application of fine art to leather garments was featured on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s program “Art Beat” in 2007.

Marianne is currently traveling more and exploring plein air landscape oil painting. “After a long and satisfying career designing as a service for others, it’s so refreshing to paint for pleasure and set function aside,” she says. Of course, there’s still an old house under remodel here in Bend.

Marianne has been on the Bend Habitat’s Rubbish Renewed Fashion show team several times, returning full circle to designing leather fashion garments. She has a degree in Art from Marylhurst University.

Karin Roy
Karin grew up in Seattle during the 1960’s in a very athletic outdoors-oriented family, and was fortunate enough to watch the building of the 1960 World’s Fair in what was a well-educated but very provincial city, where the Space Needle and Microsoft ultimately arose and thrived. She reveled in a creative life, going to art school, working in restaurants and retail, event concepting and management in a range of roles, while raising a family in the city she’d grown up in. A variety of interests prompted her to live in other places throughout her life, but she always returned home to Seatown.

Six years ago, she moved to Bend and has had the good fortune to continue to work with creative people in every context — from cider and beer to flaming sculpture and almost everything in between — in her role as Creative and Vendor Director for Lay It Out Events. As such, she has a small part in recognizing, nurturing and highlighting the skill, talent and diligence it takes to hone one’s craft. She oversees the overall vendor profiles at local events; her personal focus is on the creative side: artists, craftspeople, chefs and brewers.

Melissa Atillo
Melissa Atillo, a fashion enthusiast, graduated from FIDM Los Angeles with a degree in fashion design and development. Atillo’s career started in the action-sports industry in Orange County, Calif. Working first in a sewing factory, she designed and developed private-label apparel for large retailers PacSun and Tilly’s, as well as early niche surf brands SHY and Tommy Bahama. Next, she worked under Volcom as a menswear technical designer. Her last venture in clothing design was working on her own organic clothing line.

Eventually, Atillo was drawn back to work with her family as a third-generation furniture-maker rooted in the Philippines. She became creative director of her family’s furniture business, designing and developing products for American companies like Pier 1 Imports, Stanley, Bassett, Hammary & many others.

Atillo couldn’t stay away from fashion too long. She currently is shopkeeper for her fashion boutique, Lost Season. She loves providing Central Oregon a place for the fashion-forward community, and is looking forward to its store expansion early this summer.

Cliff Feingold
A native Oregonian who has lived in Bend for 25 years, Feingold attended the University of Oregon and graduated from Portland State University with a business and marketing degree. He’s been in the furniture industry for 38 years, and has worked both wholesale and retail, and has owned a high-end furniture store in Bend for many years. He has two beautiful daughters, both Oregon college grads, and it’s always been his dream to live in Bend and raise his family in the greatest city anywhere.

Marcy Monte
An art teacher for 30 years in the Bend-La Pine School District, Monte began her career at Bend High School, before teaching at High Desert Middle School, Marshall High School and Cascade Middle School.

Monte has two wonderful kids that were raised in Bend. She loves her husband, Peter, and enjoys being in the mountains and on rivers during her free time. She has an art camp and loves watching kids be creative with any materials she can find.

Stuart Breidenstein

Artist, jeweler and creator of creative spaces.

Stuart has been working on art since before he can remember. He’s been involved in music, fashion, functional and 2-dimensional art, and jewelry. But in the last two decades, his focus has turned to creating spaces where others can be creative. In California he was instrumental in several projects and collectives before moving to Bend, where he co-founded The Workhouse and Bright Place Gallery. Current projects include creating a café/retail space out of an old school bus and generally building up a new arts district, 9th Street Village, in Bend.

Denise Rowcroft
Denise, Sustainability Educator for the Rethink Waste Project (Deschutes County’s one-stop shop for information and resources for waste prevention, reuse, recycling and composting), joined The Environmental Center in 2006. She’s also responsible for the Environmental Center’s Kansas Avenue Learning Garden, an urban community green space that she designed and built with community support and volunteers from a vacant lot in 2010.

Rowcroft has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Outdoor Education from Prescott College and more than 15 years’ experience with youth in classroom, outdoor and therapeutic settings. When she’s not busy being a new mom, she’s probably skiing, floating a river or creating jewelry and art from upcycled materials at Lost and Found Art.