Mica Donna Pocket Penelope

Cuteness Curator

Mica works with Mitch in a good cop/bad cop type of way; you know she's the bad cop. Incidentally, she despises 'cute' art and would rather listen to noise. Catch her around town as DJ Furmica. 

Joe Jeffers is a co-curator of Museum as Instrument: A Sound Art Residency at Elsewhere. Joe is a musician, producer and Director of 8550 Ohio (Chicago and Chesterhill, OH).

2016 House(pitality) Curator

Fhalyshia Orians is an illustrator and crafter who finds inspiration in observation. Interested in the practice of art and aesthetics in the seemingly mundane activities of everyday life, she enjoys overlooked or unseen interventions that play with our relationships to memory, our senses, and the world around us.

2015 Intern

Fhalyshia emerged from a corn field in Northwest Ohio roughly five years ago, and has since received her B.A. in Painting from Guilford College. Her hobbies include crocheting, talking to plants, making playlists for every conceivable situation or mood possible, and taking walks with no intended destination. Can generally be found drinking coffee on the fire escape in the wee hours of the morning.

Cedric Blue II

Operations Curator

Cedric was raised in the non-profit world via volunteering and later project managing for The Greensboro Youth Council (under the Greensboro, NC Parks & Recreation Department) and Triad Health Project. After a stint in corporate sales working for FedEx Office in NYC Cedric returned to North Carolina to get back to his non-profit roots, working in development for the regional theater Triad Stage. For his next act Cedric has joined the curator's team at the living museum to apply his scientific approach to systems, fanatical flair for filing, and love for art in all of its forms to supporting the cultural revolution that is Elsewhere.

Mitchel Oliver

Documentary Curator (2014-2015)

Mitch works on visuals, audio, food and land with his cat Mica.

Patrick McDonnell | Education Curator and South Elm Projects Coordinator (2015)

Patrick McDonnell has worked in government, nonprofit, and start-ups and has a breadth of understanding about how to navigate the different sectors of city building. He holds a Master’s degree in Urban Planning and Master’s in Higher Education from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Elsewhere he worked at Dallas City Hall as an Urban Designer for a year, and freelanced for two years consulting on creative placing making projects and youth education programs with nonprofits in the Dallas area. In 2012, Patrick was named to the Next City Vanguard class as one of 40 under 40 urban leaders in the county. He serves on the Association for Community Design board (2012-present), including a term as President from 2013-2014. As South Elm Projects Coordinator, he works closely with Elsewhere’s curators to launch and oversee the call for South Elm artist portfolios, articulate public place-making practices as well as expand relationships with local community stakeholders, businesses and partners.

Shannon Stratton is a founder and Executive Director of threewalls, a Chicago based not-for-profit for the presentation of contemporary art and ideas. Established in 2003, threewalls has grown from a start-up exhibition space to a vital visual arts organization supporting contemporary art through solo exhibitions, residencies, grants, publications, conferences and commissioning programs. With Green Lantern Press she founded and published (via threewalls) PHONEBOOK, a guide to contemporary independant and artist-run projects, now in its third volume, and The Artists Run Chicago Digest, a companion, appraisal and extension to the exhibition of the same name at The Hyde Park Center. Along with Roots & Culture, Document and The Public Media Institute, she co-founded (as threewalls) the MDW Fair in Chicago, a gathering of artists and independent visual arts platforms. She is a co-founder of FIELD: Artist Projects and Spaces, a national alliance of and advocacy group for small-scale visual arts platforms and their producers.

Program & Productions Curator 2013-2015

Jennie was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and came to North Carolina by way of New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.  Her writing and curatorial work focus on the relationship between art and cultural politics in the 21st Century.  She aims to lend ideas a social form by bringing people together to participate in conversations that shape social conditions and the physical and psychological spaces where ideas are shared.  

Jennie oversees Elsewhere’s residency programs and directs artistic processes and project production at the museum.  Additionally, she acts as a liaison between artists and communities and coordinates the production of public programs at the museum.  She is a curator and art historian focusing on situation driven aesthetics and radical ampersanding.  Jennie received a BA in Anthropology and Biology from Mount Holyoke College in 1999 and completed PhD course work in Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011. Her curatorial projects have included contributions to “More Love: Art, Politics and Sharing,” “Counter Lives: Portraiture in Contemporary Art” and “John Wesley’s Boeing in Context” at the Ackland Art Museum.

Favorite Elsewhere collection:  The Chicken Nuggets.

Lucia Carroll, documentarian and curator, is a photographer and interdisciplinary artist most recently based out of Providence, RI. She was was born in Bogota, Colombia and grew up on four different continents. Lucia returned to the states to attend Smith College, where she received her BA in Studio Art. Her work explores the curation of self and our own narratives through physical and digital objects and strives to give those objects a voice. Using both photography and other forms of documentation she creates structure and systems to present them in frank means while also revealing the stories behind them. Her most recent work investigates how regional and national identity is integrated into our urban environments and how histories of place and space, both official and unofficial, can re-activate a neighborhood, town, or city through its inhabitants. 

Intern 2012

Paul Howe is the Commissioner of The Bureau of Maintenance, Repair, and Rebuilding. "The Bureau of Maintenance, Repair, and Rebuilding is a public service dedicated to improving the health of our infrastructures, machines, and commodities, because we believe that the health of these things is at the root of our political, economic, and cultural health." He is also a turnkey creative infrastructure developer. He received his education from Cynthia Parry, Drew Goerlitz, John Hock, and Andy Dunnill, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in home repair and bellying through muddy crawlspaces under the wisdom of Hernan Durango. 

Building Curator 2013

Paul is a sculptor, builder, re-arranger, and maintenance expert. He fixes public infrastructure for free, engineers off the cuff, and believes that the value of a thing lies in the stuff it is of, not its decorations, though decorations are okay sometimes. He has worked at Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota, has exhibited his publicly scaled sculptures up and down the east coast and midwest, and has built two wood fired pizza ovens. He holds a BFA from SUNY Plattsburgh, and an MFA in sculpture from UNCG.

Paul Howe on GOOD on Facebook.

Operations Curator 2012-2014

Erica is a young social researcher and lifehacker from the Bayou State and a graduate of Centenary College of Louisiana with a BA in Political Science and a BA in Psychology. Her work spans medium divides, bringing her social skills to musicians, filmmakers, public artists and photographers alike. Continuing her studies from the road, she followed the migratory patterns of transient communities to Elsewhere.

Emily Ensminger, born in Durham, NC, is a conceptual artist and advocate for independent multi-use live/work organizations. Through programming, textiles and functional systems, Emily’s work addresses necessity as a creative practice operating at the intersection of admin, art, and daily life. Curatorial, project coordination and presentation focus is on experimental production and organizations outside art centers.

Emily led the organization as Creative Director (2018-2020).

Jen Martin / Building Curator is a former childhood beauty queen and huge fan of avocados. While her work professionally has been in retail visual design, her true passions range from eating food of bright colors and eventually living in her mom's beach house. Short term goals include making Elsewhere look beautiful and perfecting a fishtail.

Chris Kennedy is a teaching artist and curator living in Greensboro, NC.  He makes place-based projects that experiment with social learning, queer identity, and civic play. His process is research-based and collaborative. He is currently working through education and the rise of academic capitalism by playing inside a living museum Elsewhere, and pursuing a PhD at the University of North Carolina. At Elsewhere Kennedy directs CoLab a youth-led platform for media experiments and digital storytelling that speaks to peers. His previous projects include an intergenerational free school in an abandoned park in North Brooklyn (School of the Future), a movement research platform exploring fungi as metaphor for connectivity (StrataSpore), and an ongoing investigation into queer identity (Queer Explorer's Club).

Production Curator, 2012

Resident, August 5-31, 2010

Aislinn Pentecost-Farren is an artist, curator, and historian exploring historical and experimental museum design. At Elsewhere, Aislinn supported artists from selection to completion—guiding a site-specific residency process that links artists, objects, collections, and communities through works, events, and public actions. She has worked as Curatorial Design Assistant at the National Museum of American Jewish History, Curatorial Fellow at the Slought Foundation, and Research Fellow at SoundField, all in Philadelphia. She has worked and with for artists Mark Dion, J. Morgan Puett, and Gene Coleman.

She has a background in postal correspondence, documentary, cartography and alternative education. She received a BA in anthropology from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2006, and has worked with the Chicago History Museum, the Raleigh City Museum, Cabinet Magazine. Her work borrows from artistic practice to develop museum exhibits that exploit the vulnerable area between intuitive experience and intellectual consumption to offer visitors an interaction with the polyphonic nature of reality.

Valerie Wiseman

Communications Curator (2012-2015)

Valerie is an artist and administrator interested in the intersection of public programs and creative fields. She also worked with the North Carolina Entrepreneurship Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and holds a BA in Communications & Media and focus in Arts Administration from Goucher College in Baltimore, MD.

Valerie also worked as Operations Curator from 2011-2012 and as a Documentarian Intern and Assistant to the Directors from 2010-2011.

Walker Tufts / Communications Curator is a contemporary collaborator who uses writing, art, and dialogue to build new creative knowledge. Walker served as archivist and research librarian at Mildred’s Lane, and public liaison for the international collective Spurse. At Elsewhere, he supports the documentation, marketing, and public dissemination of Elsewhere’s creative production across media platforms. His practice explores institution’s capacity for propagation, lifestyle practice, and creative research. He worked as Artistic Director and Manager of Blue Nile Ethiopian Cuisine. Walker holds a MA in Studio Art from James Madison University.

Curator, Production Assistant, 2008.

Curator, 2008.