NISDA STAFF

PIERO FENCI

I’ve always defined myself by the work I have done. I grew up on the island, and consider myself as close to a native as one can get without being born on the rock.

Work has been my salvation in this world into which I have fallen. On the island I have worked as a busboy, a salad chef, a short order cook, a scallop shucker, a sailing instructor, a bartender, an airplane parker, a carpenter, and an instructor at the Nantucket Island School of Design and the Arts.  

I am now a professor emeritus, having taught at the state university of Chihuahua for the past 20 years, and at Stephen F Austin State University, a branch of the University of Texas, for the past 50 years.

The key to my happiness is that I adore what I do, and am engaged in a passionate anti-entropic imperative – a quest that creates order in the face of chaos, a life’s work that gives joy to the people I touch. 

And I’m not done yet. Lots of irons in the fire. As the old timers I worked with banging nails on the island used to say, “Onward through the fog!”