Liz Behnke has been a Phoenix resident since 1990, when she moved to Phoenix to join a large law firm as a young lawyer. She began taking pottery classes at Phoenix Center for the Arts in the mid-1990’s, and continued to take classes off and on while practicing commercial real estate law, until becoming a teaching artist at the Center in 2016 after retiring from law. Her artistic focus is on functional pottery, both thrown and hand built, and her teaching philosophy is to encourage people to develop their natural creativity and learn good techniques to express their artistic ideas in ceramics.