SWAT Reveals 2026 Lead Demonstrators Including National and Regional Talent

SWAT posted a lead demonstrator lineup for its SWAT 2026 symposium and confirmed the event dates as Aug 28-30 while announcing an additional rotation at 8 AM on Friday morning to give attendees more demo choices. The Facebook announcement, timestamped Jan 26 at 4:50 AM, listed seven lead demonstrators and drew 60 reactions, 7 comments, and 10 shares.

The seven names published in the announcement were John Beaver, Trent Bosch, Andy Chen, Jason Clark, Rebecca DeGroot, Mike Jackofsky, and Colwin Way. The Facebook post described the roster as “outstanding regional demonstrators and Lead Demonstrators of national and international renown.” Several commenters praised the slate - Patricia Thomason Roberts wrote “That’s a GREAT lineup!!” and Rick Chichester posted “Incredible lineup.” A ticket question from Tracy Letson prompted SWAT to direct readers to its website and to the name Southwest Association of Woodturners for further information.

SWAT’s website excerpts provide extended biographical detail for three of the named leads. John Beaver is listed as a 2026 Lead and his bio notes that “after spending over 25 years in Hollywood, filming television commercials, John began experimenting with a lathe he had inherited” and that his signature “wavy” design grew from living near the Pacific ocean and trying to bring the motion of waves into turned forms. Andrew Chen, listed as Andy Chen and shown as a 2026 Lead from College Station, Texas, is described as “self-taught” and active in woodworking “almost his entire adult life”; the site records that he began segmented turning in 1992 after building furniture with tight fitting joinery. Two demo titles appear near Chen’s entry: “Walking Teapot” and “Mini Aquifer,” and the site also shows the demo-topic lines “Revelations in Hollowing” and “Vessels and Surfaces” in the same fragment, although the supplied excerpt does not explicitly attribute those two lines to a single demonstrator. Mike Jackofsky, also labeled a 2026 Lead on the site, is described as specializing in hollow vessels and natural-edge burl work, having been a “featured presenter” at American Association of Woodturners symposiums and the Utah Woodturning Symposium in Provo, Utah, participating in the Emma Lake Collaboration in Canada, and having work in the permanent collections of the Sam Maloof Historical Residence Museum in Alto Loma, CA, the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, CA, and the AAW collection in Minneapolis, MN.

The supplied materials include no biographical or demo-topic excerpts for Trent Bosch, Jason Clark, Rebecca DeGroot, or Colwin Way. Dennis Belcher’s public schedule also appears in the record and lists a previous SWAT engagement as “Aug 27-30 Southwest Association of Woodturners (SWAT) Demonstrator, Cancelled Covid” under 2025 entries, a separate item that documents a past cancellation rather than the 2026 announcement.

SWAT’s Jan 26 post sets expectations for expanded demo capacity at SWAT 2026 with the extra Friday rotation and a seven-person lead slate that mixes nationally known turners and regional talent; ticketing and full schedule details were directed to the SWAT website under the Southwest Association of Woodturners name.