Rod Northcutt is interested in people—how they live, die, love, fight, screw, eat, drink, share, hoard, isolate, commune, work, make, and think. He was trained in art schools (MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA in Painting & Drawing from the University of North Texas) and he has exhibited internationally, although he gave up on making pretty things for rich people long ago. He has lived and worked in Austin, Southern New Mexico, Chicago, Detroit, Rochester, and Southern Ohio, and he began teaching at the university level in 1999 in El Paso. He now creates projects that aim to generate dialogs within communities through creative, making-based practice. He is a professor of sculpture at Miami University, Ohio and he maintains a community studio in rural College Corner, OH, Called MAKETANK Projects with his wife Christina Miller and also is one of two co-directors of MAKETANK, Inc. which administers the Oxford Kinetics Festival. Refusing to work alone, he collaborates with other like-minded artists and collectives, cultural groups, and citizens of small communities to use art, intervention, and dialog to address social challenges.

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.

Daniel Dean often instigates collaborative projects that address site-specificity, spatial relationships and our engagement with media and technology. He produces sculpture, video and public art projects that challenge expectations while re-imagining value and exchange systems, personal experience, participation, and our relationship to things.He has exhibited and performed his work at: the Bakken Museum, Minneapolis; the Weisman Museum, Minneapolis; The Soap Factory, Minneapolis; Northern Spark Festival, Minneapolis; The Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC; Nathan Cummings Foundation, NYC; The World Bank, DC; NGBK, Berlin. Dean has an MFA in Experimental and Media Art from the University of Minnesota.

Brendan is an Arctic archaeologist and cultural anthropologist based in Nunavut, Canada. His work focuses on the documentation and reconstruction of traditional technologies through land-based workshops and the recording of community memories. Brendan has a PhD in Anthropology, and his current research investigates the tangled lives of humans and objects through recourse to such items as amulets, material mnemonics and children’s toys. Jude’s artwork is driven by themes of psychology and transformation. Depicting bodies in various states of composition, it examines how our imagination negotiates abstract notions such as growth, change and mortality through metaphorical and experiential avenues. Sculptural bodies, created from papier-mâché and epoxy resin become sites of fusion, in which physical anatomy is merged with allegorical counterparts. These altered bodies are then painted in a subdued oil palette. Their representational nature is reminiscent of museum dioramas, taxidermy and didactic science models, causing them to waiver between fact and a sense of unease and mystery. When exhibited together, the works produce an intertwining narrative of transition and longing.

Athena Kokoronis is a cross-disciplinary performing artist based in NYC whose works are often participatory and mix food and dance, to better understand connections between history, appetite, and movement in society.  Her works are performances and are often collaborative and research-based. Recent performances have been presented in New York City at the Judson Church, Flea Theater, Governor’s Island and elsewhere.

Sophie Holstein is interested in the emotional and spiritual side of how people experience each other. Her work reflects her experiences with and observations of people. The figure is the primary subject in her work and is mostly depicted as a gestural silhouette, painted intuitively and fast.Although her inspirations are derived from reality, my paintings and drawings are not specifically narrative. The invention of a stage helps her to place the characters in a context that blurs recognition. The fragmented reality then, becomes a place that offers a new perspective on familiar effects caused by interaction between people.By creating paintings and drawings fraught with psychological content, she explores and filters the impact of my surroundings. Holstein's goal is to translate figures into shapes and colors and to discover the essence and magic of crowds.

Jillian Mayer steeps her artistic practice in the verisimilitude of a generation that came of age in the 1980s. Mayer calls upon drawing, photography, video, online platforms, installation, and performance to enact scenarios of apathy, dysfunction, and disillusionment. Indoctrinated into expectations of upward mobility, instant gratification, and the succinct finesse of a television sitcom and web experience, Mayer critiques the dissonance between her childhood optimism and the state of contemporary culture with an erudite playfulness. In 2010, her video Scenic Jogging was one of the 25 selections for the Guggenheim’s Youtube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video and was exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany. Recent solo projects include Family Matters at David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2011), Love Trips at World Class Boxing, Miami (2011), Erasey Page at the Bass Museum of Art (2012) and Precipice/PostModem at Locust Projects (Miami) for which the gallery received a Harpo Foundation grant. Her video works have been premiered at galleries and museums internationally and film festivals such as SXSW and Sundance. She was recently featured in Art Papers and in ArtNews discussing identity, Internet and her artistic practices and influences.Mayer is the front woman for #PostModem, a performance collaborative that makes meta-pop music based in art/web theory. Their original songs will be used in a feature length musical film that Mayer is writing, directing and producing in collaboration with Lucas Leyva. The satirical film takes place in the future and tackles digital identity and net neutrality. The film extends to software apps, poetry, installations and Internet experiences.

Anna Barker hails from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and is thrilled to be back in her home state! After attending high school at Durham School of the Arts, along with multiple intensives at North Carolina School of the Arts and the American Dance Festival, she went on to graduate from Temple University’s BFA program in 2009 with a concentration in choreography. She also received a BA in Clinical Psychology. Since her relocation to New York City, Anna has created and performed primarily with Manhattan-based company Megan Bascom & Dancers. She has also shown her own work at Dance New Amsterdam, New York University and Triskelion Arts in Brooklyn. Anna enjoys creating movement specific to her own experiences, and explores the human condition through gesture and idiosyncratic movement. Most recently, she has been furthering her movement practice by completing a Pilates apparatus certification through InsideOut Body Therapies in Durham, NC.

We, Adam and Rosalynn Rothstein, are a human partnership in which artistic and conceptual interests merged to a cohesive narrative from what, to us, seemed to be two disparate backgrounds. Much of Rosalynn’s current influence comes from practicing Sogetsu Ikebana–the Japanese art of flower arranging. The founder of the Sogetsu School, Sofu Teshigahara, did not see a boundary between sculpture and decorative flower arranging. Her work in the academic field of folklore also informs the partnership’s thinking about ethnography, vernacular practice and vernacular culture.Adam is an insurgent archivist and writes about politics, media, and technology. He is most interested in the canons of history and prediction, the so-called “Future-Weird”, and the unstable ramifications of today’s cultural technology. In the artistic arena, he is interested technology-based art and the interaction between manufacturing technology and craft, as well as social production skills. This includes the social aspects of production and art–not only art’s effect on society, but the work of production’s effect on society. As we began to examine and merge our artistic practices, we became interested in large scale installations that push the viewer and require the viewer to interact with the piece and the work process. Re-used and re-purposed materials have also come to serve as the basis for much of our practice. While we believe in creating a professional and aesthetically pleasing end product, we focus on using materials that reach this goal and also make use of materials which might otherwise be discarded. Our other work focuses on viewer interaction and modes of presentation which push the viewer to be self-conscious of their perspective. Adam’s technical skills in material assemblage (welding, adhesives, carpentry) and Rosalynn’s perspective from Ikebana (the importance of space, line and mass) help us create successful installations with re-used materials which analyze the importance of our relationships to objects, as well as our relationships to each other.

Katie Ford is a visual artist currently based in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work grows out of print techniques to incorporate objects and installations that dig into the relationships we build with and within the places we inhabit. She is intrigued by the age of exploration, improbable landscapes, and place as metaphor. Katie has exhibited nationally in both solo and group exhibitions and has been awarded artist residencies by the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, The Proper Residency in St. Louis, and the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh's Tough Art program.

Kirsty Robertson is a writer, curator, and professor of museum studies and contemporary art at Western University, Canada. Her research focuses on activism, visual culture, textile histories, changing economies and labour practices. For her residency at Elsewhere she is exploring clutter: of things, facts, fictions and memories.

Bridget Beck grew up in South Dakota where she soaked in the plains and the sky until graduating from Augustana College in 2000 with a BA in English and Art.  She then spent some time at Franconia Sculpture Park in MN as an intern in 2001.  After finishing the internship, she went East and worked in the same capacity for Socrates Sculpture Park, Mark DiSuvero’s Spacetime Studio, and the Connecticut Sculpture Park.  After her time out East, Bridget returned to the Midwest where she continued to make sculpture in South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.  She went back to Franconia Sculpture Park again as an intern in 2004.  Bridget then  supplemented her eclectic resume with an AS degree in geomatics (civil engineering) which she completed in 2006.  After receiving her AS degree she was employed by Ramsey County, MN where she designed roads in 3D, surveyed the lay of the land, inspected road projects, and tested soils until 2012.  She has recently left her Franconia Sculpture Park Resident Artist position, where she mentored emerging artists and wrote the Franconia Blog from 2010- 2012, to attend graduate school at UCLA. Bridget is a fellowship recipient and is now creating sculpture in California's thriving Los Angeles art scene.

Michelle Marie Murphy creates photography and video art about beauty "tools" and the idealization of beauty in the United States.  This work takes place in the form of large-scale photos and videos of the applications of make-up, exercises, or macro photography showing the tactility of the products themselves.  Murphy's practice is influenced by Third-Wave Feminism (or Post-Feminism), advertising, scientific imaging, performance art in the 1970s, Post-Modern Photography, and abstract painting. Murphy received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography with a minor in Digital Arts from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2004. Her artwork has been published and exhibited Internationally, including exhibitions in Geneva Switzerland, Guatemala City, Chicago, and San Francisco. She is a Professional Photographer at the NASA Glenn Research Center and co-curator of the international art and culture online magazine MAKE8ELIEVE. In 2012-2013 her work was featured in DISCOVER Magazine, Buzzfeed, Art & Science Journal, DivineCaroline, SFMOMATumblr, NATIVE Publications, Maybelline NY Tumblr, Newsweek and the Daily Beast - Picture Dept Tumblr, 20x200, Popular Photography magazine, and the Drawing Center Viewing Program.

Jeannette Petrik considers design as an opportunity for public empowerment and skill sharing, as a tool for everyday political engagement. Behind the production and consumption of objects lies a fundamentally subjective use value, be it of a cultural, ideological, political or other personal nature. This, she explores through her practice. Petrik sees the role of the designer as grounded in an in-depth analysis of the dynamics inherent in social arrangements and material cultures. Putting into doubt our socio-ontological constants, our discursive and material routines, which structure our lifeworlds, catalogue them into separate registers and provide them with the aura of the inert and rigid, would necessitate us to “overcome the laziness of consciousness" (J. Beuys) and to explore a mode of thought which cuts across convenient totalizations. In her practice as a designer, researcher and writer, she is dedicated to the facilitation of those events of doubt in dialogue with her surrounding environment.

Jazz Leeb is a Visual Artist from San Jose, California whose work examines certain metaphysical truths by focusing on forces of creation, growth, transcendence and death. He investigates the space between spaces as a way to see into things, past the surface where possibility exists and new structures unfold. Through his process he plays with preconceptions of that which is recognizable, in order to re-incorporate new identities and question the nature of becoming. Jazz has recently been awarded the ISC(International Sculpture Center) Student Achievement Award In Contemporary Sculpture Honorable Mention.

Dao Nguyen is a Vietnamese American artist based in Chicago and a recent MFA graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Working through performance, writing and installation, she creates participatory situations that reflect upon ontology, epistemology, and subjectivity through play.She has shown work at Hyde Park Art Center, Sullivan Gallery, Carousel Project Space, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Brea Art Gallery, Anaheim Museum, BC Space Gallery, Cypress College Photography Gallery, Long Beach Arts Gallery, The Foundry Arts Centre, and Irvine Fine Arts Center.

Ezra Reaves (they/them) is a professional actor, performer, comedian, singer and experimental theater artist. They've tour nationally and internationally with The Neo-Futurists, performed over 150 shows as Velma in the immersive show "The Speakeasy" and most recently played Spike/Shorty in Patricia Cotter's world-premiere play "The Daughters" at SF Playhouse. As a comedian, Ezra has opened for Janeane Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk, John Hodgman, Paul F. Tompkins and even shared the stage with Michael Ian Black at SF Sketchfest.

Casey Middaugh is an immersive experience designer from Seattle, WA. Her work frequently has elements of games and theater, and endeavors to evoke and engender strong emotions.

Casey's work has led her to found a company that helps people organize their possessions when they find that they are getting in the way of their enjoyment of life.

She holds a MMus from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

sleeper (born 1987 in Miami, Fl) is an interdisciplinary artist with an emphasis on sculpture and installation. His work draws lines between relationships. It calls on the false realities created to cope with societal constraints, sometimes masked, layered, stitched or intangible. He received his BFA in sculpture from New World school of the Arts with concentrations in electronic media and art history. sleeper currently lives and works in Miami, FL.

Marin Abell's itinerant practice is fueled by a desire to en/joy his environment and culture through entanglement; his goal is to beguile communities in ways powerful enough to sustain attention and deliberate reflection. He is inspired by the shape shifting trickster who walks the boundary between the imaginary and the real, and erases the distinction along the way. Marin was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and grew up in southeastern Virginia. He teaches Sculpture at the University of Alabama Huntsville.