Travis Laughlin (Board President / Executive Committee / Governance Committee Chair)

Former Elsewhere Interim Executive Director Travis Laughlin has worked within the intersection of arts and education for over 25 years. As the former Senior Director of Programs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Travis was responsible for the oversight of the Foundation’s various artist support programs and a member of the Foundation’s senior management team. In his previous role as the Art Education Director for the Joan Mitchell Foundation, he served as the visionary and implementer of all Foundation art education initiatives. Prior to his role as Art Education Director, he worked with the Foundation as the Professional Development Program Coordinator creating and implementing comprehensive and equity-focused professional development for the Foundation’s Artist-Teachers. Travis began his career in education as a teacher at an alternative high school in Charlotte, North Carolina. Upon moving to New York City, he worked with the Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement House as a Program Coordinator for their after-school pregnancy prevention program. A North Carolina native, Travis earned his BA in Secondary Social Studies Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his MS in Education from Bank Street College.

Marjorie Loflin (Board Treasurer / Executive Committee / Finance Committee Chair) is a Senior Accountant at Bernard Robinson & Company.

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.

Kerri has a balance of skills earned during her tenure as Director of Caldcleugh Arts Center and as the Operations Manager for Elsewhere—a living museum and residency for visual artists. In 2015, she established Scrapmettle Entertainment Group—a theater development company—from an idea born from the desires of a community whose lives were positively influenced by the subtle healing effects of participating in live theater. Her team of emerging artists, directors and writers now use this platform to create new work, hone their craft or learn another aspects of the industry.

Kerri has written and produced a number of devised performances with her theater community in Greensboro, NC. She is an advocate for the arts, artists and the advancement of expressive art therapies.

Nich uses art to conjure immersive experience(s) and emotions within himself and others. Through human expression, he weaves together photography, poetry / creative writing, spoken word, illustration, multimedia, public installations, and bookmaking. He finds power in story--the way folktales travel through time, and how stories continuously shape many aspects in life. He seeks to create narratives that remind himself, and others, to unweave internalized harmful narratives / social standards, provoke self-love/smiles, create mischievous shenanigans, and to appreciate the many-varied emotions within the human experience.

Yari is a queer woman of color, an artist, and art historian focusing on bringing light and creating better opportunities in art spaces for queer artists of color. Even while pursuing her undergrad she took every opportunity to focus her papers on censorship of queer artist and lead seminar discussions on intersectional feminism. Her greatest affinity and source of inspiration for strength, courage, and charisma being the ballroom scene in 80's New York City. Truly falling in love with the mix of art, performance, and authenticity in personal identity and self-expression exhibited in the ballroom scene. She plans on focusing her future higher education on art history as it intertwines with the history of queer culture.

By deconstructing and transforming canonized familiar myths from varied beliefs and traditions, and creating fantastic realms, where characters with elusive gender, sexual and political identities serve as alternative cultural heroes – Gil Yefman challenges and undermines the structured definitions and portrayal of the “other”, in order to explore and cherish the intrinsic potential of the extraordinary. He uses a manifold spectrum of practices and media, with a predilection towards the craftswomanship of crochet knitting. Yefman indulges in the therapeutic virtues of knitting as means to dwell on personal and collective traumas, as well as to reflect upon recurrent obsessive patterns in mankind's societies.

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.

Shameeka Davis-Dunning is an Illustrator in the Triad area, her work is influenced by futurism and anime. Her goal is to carve out space where seeing black characters in anime becomes the norm. She graduated from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University with a BS in Fashion Merchandising and Design. she is also a lover of cinema; believes everything is worth watching at least once and you can occasionally find her hiking in the mountains.Ig: _pharaohs_queen

Carolyn Gennari is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, performance, photography, and sculpture. Using the archive as source material, her creative practice is heavily research based and explores how performance and media can generate news ways of thinking about the past. Often beginning her projects within archives and museums, Carolyn traces objects back to present day communities, places and events, positioning the archive as an active site in which to consider history and its relationship to the contemporaneous. In her work, it is no longer important that original historical events be portrayed as much as the interpretation of those events spun from a process of fragmentation, imitation and re-imagination. Using storytelling and performance as tools for expanding what we understand as knowledge, her work provides historiographic experiences that allow for new modes of interpretation, action and reflection.During Gennari's residency, she created The Object of This Exercise.

Cecilia is an animator and musician from San Francisco, CA with backgrounds in film, dance, virtual reality, photography, and sculpture. They dig playing where music and movement meet, and their work tends toward the meditative, textural, conceptual, and abstract. Cecilia also coordinates a team of abolitionist artists through JusticeLA and organizes toward housing as a human right with the Los Angeles Tenants Union. Their hope in all their work is to make more space for people to rest and breathe.

During Sweet-Coll's residency, they created By Us For Us.

Emerie Snyder announced at age five that her hobby was "thinking about lots of things." It's still true. Emerie is a NYC-based theatre director and creator of new performance work, focusing on site-responsive theatre, relationships between visual art and theatre, and solo performance. Current projects in development include EXHIBIT, an immersive gallery tour play; DUTIFUL VICTIMS, a site-specific theatre experiment inspired by Eugene Ionesco’s Victims of Duty; TRANSMISSION, a participatory performance sermon by Gwydion Suilebhan; and THIS IS LIKE THAT, a slide lecture play by Michael Sean Cirelli. Emerie is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, a New Georges Affiliated Artist, and the Arts Curator for Warren Saint Marks Community Garden in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

During Snyder's residency, she created This is not a Museum Tour.

Erick Medel (b.1992) lives and works in Los Angeles. Can one become a real American simply by desiring the same things the dominant culture desires? Even when that stage (middle class ideals) is achieved can one truly be seen as American? Through transformations in materials and form, Medel opens up a dialogue about the customization of identity and the power of consumer culture, habits, and symbolism in the promotion of ideologies.During Medel's residency, he created El Coyote As A Protector, 2019.

Parasol B is an artist exploring interactive and experiential work through sound, electronics, sculpture and painting. She finds it imperative that people have access to artwork they can interact with and finds it intriguing that many people are uncomfortable with touching artwork, even when given permission. She also creates specific messages for people to take away from her work by encoding data visually, then supplying the visual vocabulary or tools to decode the meaning.

During Parasol's residency, she created The Cabinet of Cacophonies.

Furen Dai’s practice has focused largely on the economy of culture industry, and how languages lose function, usage, and history. Dai’s hybrid art practice utilizes video, sound, sculpture, painting and collaboration. Her years as a professional translator and interest in linguistic studies have guided her artistic practice since 2015. She has been researching and developing the nearly extinct language of NüShu. The language, derived from Chinese characters, was created and used exclusively by women.

Dai received a Bachelor in Russian Language studies from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 2010, a Graduate Diploma in Entrepreneurial Management from Boston University. She also holds a MFA degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2016. Her work has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and around the world. Past exhibitions include 13th Athens Digital Arts Festival (Greece), OSMOSIS Audiovisual Media festival 2017 (Taiwan), Illuminus Boston 2017, Now&After'16, The State Darwin Museum (Moscow). She is a recipient for The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2017, Excellence Award for the 21st Japan Media Arts Festival. The exhibition at 456 Gallery will be her first solo show in New York.

During Dai's residency, she created Dear Mother.

Programs Curator

Jess Hoyle (they/them), is an artist, art worker, activist and writer. Their personal work explores ideas of memory, histories and concepts of truth and personal fictions through the use of primarily lens-based mediums, printmaking and textiles. Their activism work centers around anti-racism, anti-sexism and equity work, creating level ground. At Elsewhere, they work as the Programs Manager.

Michelle Lisa Polissaint is a visual artist & arts organizer based in Miami, Florida. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Florida International University in Photography & Fiber Based Painting. Her current practice is focused on producing community based activations that encourage artists and community members to form collaborative relationships. As an artist she explores the nature of human interaction through textiles and photographs. Her most recent work moves from a previous series of self-portraits, Dancing With Myself, which explored her relationship with herself away from the guidance of her parents, into a new body of work documenting trips and interactions with her parents and family, If Home Was Home. She is currently a resident at Bakehouse Art Complex. Her upcoming project, Moonshine Moanin’, is a research performance project exploring identity and queerness as it relates to her upbringing in the South.During Polissaint's residency, she created Dine nan Nwa.

Kevin Brophy is a language-based performance artist based in Tampa, FL, and Pittsburgh, PA, most recently residing in Lawrence, KS as visiting faculty and artist at the University of Kansas. Her research includes the Internet of Things, biased training of AI, our changing psychological response to the screen, and how language functions—past, present, and future—in relation to these cultural occurrences. Kevin works at the intersection of digital and physical space; as in, the ‘crash’ of these two bodies and their mutual creation within the construct of the social. Our politic embodied and our personal beyond the site-of-self. Through exaggerated forms of communication, she critiques in satirical and self-implicating ways: these days, she performs more for machine than human.

During Brophy’s residency, she created Keeping Young & Living Longer: How to stay Active & Healthy past 100, or How to avoid Life Shortening Errors with fellow Rosa Nussbaum.

Diana needs some soup right now and then maybe you'll find them in the bedding section, swimming in linen duvets for a bit. She feels fulfilled in some kind of cul-de-sac upbringing, couch shopping not so different from any experiential art. 'walkie check', She confirms and performs for the visitor, 'yes, that is a thing we have and it is of different value on different kinds of days'. Framed moments in time no different than now, just a different space-time in the spectrum of a when she's walking around a bed thinking about what information you will need from another room in another space. Fulfillment, Depends on the season of art-making, apparently some on custom order or are just made to be consumed by some other process.

During Caramat’s residency, they created Social Sensory Stimulation.

Clare writes about participatory arts practices in independent arts organizations, museums, and archives. Right now she is focused on Elsewhere for the third chapter of her dissertation on artist project spaces between 2001 and 2016. She began her American life as a participant in an artist’s pedagogical project – the Sponge HQ –  where there was a beehive, a fish tank full of plecs and neon tetras, a discarded skateboard and a felted library platform in a hard to define but restful color. Back in the UK she had moved from educational roles to organizational ones in art museums, built environment advocacy, and a rural artist studio. Clare teaches undergraduate museum studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and is a candidate in the Media, Art, and Text Ph.D. program.

During van Loenen's residency, she created An Atlas of Administration.

Leiva’s research-based practice exists at the crossroads of installation, video, animation, and photography. Within this multidisciplinary approach, she explores issues related to migration, displacement, alienation, loss, the media and the effects of violence on the central American individual and society.

In Leiva’s work, personal and collective stories intertwine to create narratives that posit the individual’s vulnerability within institutional and social hierarchies. In some of her site-specific works, she forges a dynamic that engages the space’s history to reveal specific human rights issues. Her video work, which often incorporates found footage or text, explores surveillance, online culture, coded language and the impact of mass media on the individual’s perception of reality.

During Leiva’s residency, she created Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (The Last Supper).