Abby Rodriguez
Abby began studying HEMA in 2021, and has since become incredibly active in the HEMA community. When she isn’t competing herself, she can be found almost every weekend at a tournament or event, judging or supporting and coaching students.
She is passionate about creating welcoming and supporting environments for all students, in particular, URG fencers. She works with a variety of local tournaments to ensure all fencers are fairly represented and their voices are heard, and serves as both Treasurer and Equity Manager at WSTR. As an instructor at her club, she enjoys coaching new students and welcoming them into the club, as well as encouraging students to take on coaching and instructing roles in the club. She has attended plenty of workshops emphasizing an ecological approach to fencing, and seeks to bring more attention to this style of learning.
Asante Lawla
Student of Gurudev Nidar Singh and a practitioner of Shastar Vidiya, with over 12 years of experience in art. I’ve also explored various other forms of combat, boxing throughout teenage years, and later wing chun. With a background in engineering and a being qualified corrective exercise specialist these days I’m most interested in combat mechanics, specifically the area of cognitive easing.
Blake Johnson
Blake has been a part of the HEMA community for 10 years. He has been a swordsman since he was 10 and is a lead instructor. He frequently creates new exercises for the club to try and to use as learning tools. Of all polearms, his favorite is the spear. Blake loves teaching-he only does it for a living.
Brandon F. Whitehill
Brandon has been practicing one form of martial arts or another since 2012. His experience includes American Kenpo, Shaolin Kenpo, Kosho Ryu Kenpo, Muay Thai, Kickboxing, BJJ; and within HEMA he’s done a little bit of a lot since 2019.
Chris Valli
Christian Buettner
Christian has been fencing for 8 years and dancing for almost 21 years. Since early lessons that showed overlap between these two sports he has been persuing this overlap and attempting to build the movement theory and pedagogy from various dance forms into fencing. At MKdF he now teaches longsword fundamentals, military saber, and montante which have all benefited from dance-related work. As a man who does not fit the average size and physicality of HEMA fencers he is also dedicated to making his classes adaptable and useful to folks of all sizes and abilities. Additionally, Christian holds a PhD in Chemistry and Biochemistry which has been instrumental in his work researching the Franz Helm manual.
Collin Vredenburg
Collin Vredenburg is an avid competitor and passionate scholar. He started fencing in 2018, diving into an intensive training program that included self-study and research, and building a comprehensive HEMA library.
Collin applies the same dedication he has as a student to his coaching and works with beginning and advanced students teaching the Bolognese tradition of one-handed sword, Sword & Buckler, and Two-handed Sword, Smallsword and Saber in the French Tradition, and specializes in Rapier. His primary source is Gerard Thibault d’Anvers’s Academie de l’Espée, making him one of the few instructors in the United States working with this tradition. Collin is currently adapting and re-translating l’Academie into English from its original 17th century French
Edward Meyers
Edward Meyers is an attorney who has been involved in HEMA off and on since 2010. He can’t help you close on a house, but he can tell you whether a drone strike on that house is lawful under international law.
Ella Rose
Ella has been studying HEMA sonce 2017. She founded Black Cat Historical Fencing, Rhode Island’s first nonprofit HEMA club, in 2023 with co-founder Shane Scallin. Her areas of focus are Fiore’s longsword and dagger, and she also has interests in ringen and rapier. Ella teaches BCHF’s dagger, rapier, and beginner longsword classes. She has competed across the US and internationally, and she has won medals in longsword, wrestling, rapier, and mixed weapons competitions. Ella is also the lead tournament organizer of Iron Gate Exhibition, New England’s largest HEMA event. Ella has worked in many minority-focused spaces both within HEMA and in her career as an illustrator. Having dealt with chronic illness her entire martial arts career, Ella is passionate about making HEMA accessible to all people, especially those who have been historically underserved in sports.
Justin Aucoin
Justin Aucoin (aka Remy in the SCA) is the product of when a five-year-old boy who fell in love with Zorro and The Three Musketeers grows into a mostly functional adult. His life-long love of athletics and swashbuckling has led him down the road to studying and practicing historical fencing.
He is the founder and head coach of Boston Academie d’Armes. His fencing career started in 2006, first as a foilest at Boston Fencing Club before joining the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) in 2010. For more than a decade, he has studied 17th Century Italian rapier fencing systems and its offshoots found in France and the German states, as well as Italian dueling saber, dueling sword/smallsword, partisan (spear), baton-a-deux bouts, and classical Italian fencing with foil, epee, and saber.
As a competitor, Justin has won numerous rapier tournaments in the SCA — both in singles and in group melee — including Carolingia’s Baronial Rapier Champion, East Kingdom Crown Rapier Champion, and named 8x to the Pennsic Champs team. He is the 15th member of the East Kingdom’s Order of Defense, the SCA’s highest fencing award. He is also a member of the Order of the Golden Rapier and Order of the Silver Rapier for fencing prowess.
Similarly, he is a member of the SCA’s Order of Silver Brooch and the Order of the Maunche for his historical martial arts research, and holds a Silver Wheel and Silver Crescent for his coaching service to the SCA. He’s also a member of the Company of St. Jude, a group dedicated to the study, exploration, and practice of historical martial arts within the SCA. He’s currently the Consort’s Arts & Science Champion for his research and experiment in the armor protection a wool cloak gives against attacks from a sharp rapier.
Outside of the SCA, Justin is a HEMA medalist in both rapier and dagger, smallsword, and military/dueling saber. He has previously taught rapier at Athena School of Arms and has taught numerous workshops at HEMA events such as Western Martial Arts Workshop (WMAW), Iron Gate Exhibition (IGX), and Lord Baltimore’s Challenge, and American Smallsword Symposium.
He is a certified Instructor at Arms in Italian Foil through the Fencing Master Certificate Program. He is also a Level One student guide & apprentice instructor through Academie Duello, and a personal trainer through NASM. You can follow his historical fencing research at Justinswordfit.com.
Kendra Brown
Kendra Brown does independent medieval manuscript research in her free time. She started translating historical fencing sources in 2003 and has never stopped. Kendra keeps an irregular research blog called Darth Kendra Research, and has a forthcoming article in Acta Periodica Duellatorum. She also enjoys rondel dagger, polearms, and frequently longsword. If words like “research disaster” and “very deep rabbit hole” excite you, you’ll get along great.
Kyle A. Marrotte
Kyle began studying at Western Swordsmanship Technique and Research in 2016, after getting way too obsessed with the Witcher franchise. After his wife caught him swinging a plastic sword around in the backyard, she decided that he should have some idea of what he’s doing and signed him up for classes as a gift. What started as a casual interest in sword choreography revitalized his childhood love of martial arts, and he has since become a competitor, instructor, and coach at our school.
Kyle specializes in longsword, saber, dagger, various forms of historical grappling, and preparing our students for competition at local tournaments and events. He also has experience in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, MMA, and many other martial arts, and leverages his mixed experience to inform his teaching methodology and coaching strategies.
Mariana Lopez
Mariana Lopez is a founder and head coach of the Metropolitan Historical Fencing Academy (MHFA) and has 17 years of Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) experience. A highly accomplished competitor with various gold medals amongst a number of weapons she’s also a tournament organizer and referee in both North America and Europe, and a former member of the Mexican National HEMA Championships committee. Having a strong passion for art she has also partaken in a multitude of art projects related to HEMA, creating reproductions, illustrations for books, fencing manuals restoration, and other visual resources. As an International Relations major Mariana founded Esfinges, an international organization with thousands of members dedicated to the support and promotion of woman’s participation in HEMA.
Matthew Huller
Fencing since 2018 at Boston Armizare, Matthew primarily fences with the two-handed sword. He has medaled in longsword tournaments in and outside of New England.
Mike O’Brien
Mike O’Brien has been studying and practicing HEMA since 2014 and has been one of the head coaches at Boston Armizare since 2016. These days he primarily teaches longsword, rapier and dagger, sword and buckler, and saber all within the Italian tradition.
Patrick McCaffrey
Patrick is the instructor for L’Arte Historical Fencing in Fleetwood, PA, and has been training since 2015. His focus has been interpreting the words and pictures of Fiore’s works into martial action. He uses modern and traditional approaches to teach basics and conditioning for the physically strenuous arts of close combat. In the past, he has held extended 12 hour classes to teach the entirety of Fiore’s Dagger Material.
Bob Powers
Bob has been studying longsword for half a decade, as well as rapier, with no prior martial arts experience. He holds master’s degrees from the University of Chicago (Humanities), Boston College (Philosophy), and Marquette University (Philosophy) where he is currently teaching and working on his PhD in Medieval Philosophy. Bob fell in love with the sword at a young age when he read JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. He likes to say that he breaths the air of the cultures of Middle-Earth. He uses Aristotelian physics and Medieval philosophy to explain Liechtenauer’s art of fencing. He is interested in how the art of fencing was understood in the middle-ages and how that differs from the present day.
Sarah Zordan
Instructor. Person of Mystery. An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, that happens to be HEMA friend shaped.
In real life… Sarah started training in HEMA almost two decades ago, and after a sabbatical to raise their own two warriors, has now found their sword family at Laurel City Historical Fencing, where they play the part of instructor and club organizer. Sarah enjoys longsword, but has recently been exploring PH Mair’s sickle, flail, scythe and peasant stick.
Sarah’s work is in the social services field, where they work tirelessly to advocate and provide accessibility for everyone, thereby ensuring that inclusivity is in their work life, sword life, and everywhere else they might go.
Shane Scallin
I’ve been practicing hema for 10 years and am the head coach of Black Cat Historical Fencing. The main weapons systems I study are Italian longsword, 133 sword and buckler, and ringen.
