Facilities Associate

Joshua Barnes was born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, attending Gillespe, Kaiser, Grimsley schools. He enjoys meeting new people, drawing, playing video games and sports, and loves to laugh. Since facing incarceration, Joshua has been hard at work in corporate cleaning services, landscaping, construction, and customer service.

After completing our Workforce Development Program in partnership with Guilford Works, he joined the team as the Facilities Associate, keeping the museum clean and safe for its many guests.

Joshua has also launched Joshua Barnes Cleaning Services, a new social enterprise business (est. 2022), creating second chance employment opportunities for those who are formerly incarcerated. He is currently seeking to grow his business and clientele.

Thea Cohen (she/her) | Productions Manager 2020-2021

In her creative practice, Thea places an emphasis on process and experimentation and likes to learn by doing. She has a background in multimedia installation, furniture making, and methods of fabrication including woodworking, welding, and machine sewing. Her creations utilize various combinations of set, prop, puppet & costume design, video, animation, sculpture, projection, and performance. Thea enjoys non-linear storytelling and is especially interested in the distortions that occur within repetitions across materials, scale, and time. She is fascinated with functionality (or the lack there of) regarding the ways in which physical characteristics influence movement and provoke assumptions around how to inhabit space. Community is an integral part of Thea’s life, and she is always looking for ways to collaborate in all aspects of creating and living.

Communications

Yvonna is a Black Agender Diviner, Conceptual Artist, and Arts Organizer based out of Greensboro, NC. In their own work, they explore themes of gender+sexuality, memory, personal responsibility, and poverty. Through a variety of mediums, they navigate their experience and their desires. They study trends in beauty, homemaking, and sustainability in an attempt to make direct links with critical race, gender, and art theory. They also practice multiple forms of divination and understand the practice to be one of mapping narratives.They have curated interactive gallery shows, appeared on panels centered around southern sexuality, and organized affordable clothing pop ups in their community in low income areas. Through the continuation of organizing workshops, pop ups, and exhibitions, they aim to shift preconceived notions of inaccessibility.

House Manager / Curator

Avery Rose (they/them) is a 3rd generation dumpster diver, collector, maker, and jack of all trades wannabe raised in Waxhaw, NC. They have a BFA in painting and a range of professional experiences in furniture, upholstery, design, and restoration related fields. They like to explore color, shape, and line through textile work, tattooing, painting on unconventional surfaces, and collecting natural and discarded objects. Avery's work founded on interests in sustainable and communal living, travel and exploration, environmentalism, homesteading, and diy culture.

Avery has been the House Manager/Curator at Elsewhere since 2018. They have completed a number of projects including building a new front desk from collection, co-creating the Shelter Elsewhere Residency, and patching various holes around the museum in unexpected ways. Avery can be found at @dirt_soup on Instagram.

Kerri Mubaarak (Board Director / Executive Committee / Board Secretary)

If you encounter Kerri Mubaarak, it won’t take you long to figure out that her perspective is different. The way she approaches a subject—any subject— whether it’s an artist’s proposed work that she evaluates or a socio-political paradigm addressed in her performances is different. In fact, it’s difference that underlies all her works of theatrical art.

Kerri chose theater as a medium to express what she sees and senses interacting with “people in the periphery” a term she uses to describe those who are often marginalized by race, gender, religion or cultural norms. “The gift of this medium,” she says “is that the raw emotion of human experience can be shared openly and in the safety of an audience.” She considers the craft a practice of both art and healing that pre-dates modern theater.

Amelia Nura is a senior at UNCG, majoring in Photography and Media Studies. She is an interdisciplinary artist with a curiosity for uncovering psychological and social fabrications of identity and interpersonal relationships. Her fascination with uncovering truth and providing a platform for lives and narratives that are often neglected or misrepresented, manifests itself primarily through photography and film, where spaces and emotions are built into scaled-down worlds of light, sound and action, to communicate our constructed realities. Amelia likes journaling, night walks, Suspiria and Black Sabbath (minus the Dio years).

Programs 2016-2019

Gui Villalba Portel is a Greensboro-based storyteller, theatre artist, and arts organizer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. An indigenous latinx and undocumented queer, Gui often thinks about visualizing: the amplification of marginalized narratives, collective deviation within social constructs, and "new" recipes.

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).

Ian Gamble is a multimedia artist with strong ties to artists, farmers, and old time musicians in Rockingham County, NC. He hosts visiting artists and facilitates their work for the rural outreach project at Reckon Holler, a creative site and art project within his family home in Rockingham. Gamble curated the 2018 Rural Residency, facilitated on-the-ground work, and was a lead artist of Elsewhere Goes To Madison-- an off-site Elsewhere Elsewhere project in partnership with Reckon Holler.As a maker, Gamble toggles between carpenter, potter, sculptor, and tailor. Gamble was also an Elsewhere Curator in 2007 & 2008. While at Elsewhere in 2007, he produced The Skyscraper.

Palouse, Washington

June 7, 2007 – July 10, 2007 as a resident

June 5, 2008 – July 24, 2008 as a producer

Molly Goldberg and Mary Rothlisberger met elsewhere. Somewhere between the this and the that, the here and the there, the dear and the from, they built a landscape of friendship– a series of sites for shared belonging. Through the construction of temporary, moveable dwellings and gathering spaces, through storytelling amd music making, they explore questions of community, interdependence, migration, home and inbetweenness. Their collaborations merge in the passions of a dedicated community organizer and an inspiring teacher and friend-maker: making homes and crossing lines, dotting eyes, singing for supper, and setting a place at the table for every good idea. Together they made a project called Elsewhere Book Project, which is undocumented.

mixed media

website | bureau of public recollection dot org

blog | whistle stop dot vox dot com

George Scheer (Co-founder / Board Director) is Co-founder and former Executive Director of Elsewhere. George is a writer, scholar, and artist who fosters creative communities at the intersection of aesthetics and social change. George is also the grandson of Elsewhere proprietress and puzzle maker Sylvia Gray, whose stuff he has been moving around for years! George holds an MA in Critical Theory and Visual Culture from Duke University and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Political Communications.

Stephanie Sherman (Co-founder / Board Director / Program Committee Co-Chair) is a designer, director, and collaborative conspirator based in London, UK. She founded Elsewhere with George in 2003 and co-directed it with him for 10+ years. She since founded Common Field, Radioee.net, and Supervisions, a social design studio.