Kelsey Sharpe is a queer multidisciplinary conceptual artist and filmmaker of color from Jersey City, NJ of Jamaican-Indian and Irish-Slavic descent. Sharpe graduated from Oberlin College in Oberlin, OH in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in Cinema Studies and Anthropology. Sharpe’s practice examines the intersections between the digital and physical world and the ways in which those spaces alter human connection.

IG: @sharpekelsey

Website: kelseysharpe.com

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.

Christian Lee is a Puerto Rican comic who draws comics, poetry, and books. Their illustrative work varies from subcultures, to horror, to speculative fiction. Under the skin, the heart of their art and uses fiction as metaphor to explore real human relationships.

As a performer, their drawings accompany them to the stage in mixed-media performances using humor and storytelling to digest their experiences as a Hispanic POC, gender expectations, and grief.

Rae Red (they/them) encourages the radical act of laughter in the face of darkness by translating everyday realities into performance and play. Their work exposes the magic and wonder within our daily functions, from the wizardry of sight and color theory, to the way water invisibly keeps our lives flowing smoothly like a ghost within the walls. They explore subjects that are universal like blood pumping through veins, while bringing light our own mortality and to the death that is continuously occurring around us. Through performances across the United States Rae Red investigates topics that unite viewers by exposing commonalities while examining the disparate facets within them. They have presented their work in every type of space imaginable from dive bars and the backs of donut shops to The Museum of Human Achievement, High Concept Labs, Cucalorus Stage Festival, and The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. They received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Towson University’s Theatre Arts Program.

Shelter Elsewhere Fellow

Kinari Council (he/they) is a Community based mixed media artist, designer located in North Carolina.

He attended NCA&T’S VISART Program and utilizes the skills he learned to create socially conscious art centered around creating awareness and engaging subjects concerning marginalized groups. His passion is to use my creativity to speak to and for those that often go overlooked.

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.

Nicole Asselin is a textile artist and educator based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her work explores the intersection of craft, technology and the natural world. Asselin’s practice is narrative, telling the story of an object or material and its potential, both real and imagined. Her work utilizes magnification, abstraction, hyper-local material, and a hybrid digital/analog approach to making. She addresses and challenges themes of locality, tradition, innovation, handcraft, and sustainability.

Zach Whitworth (b. 1996) is a scholar, art worker, and educator from southern Oregon, USA. He studies ecology, networks, information, and some other things. He likes books, conversations, long walks, and skipping rocks.

Cheryl Cullom Stewart (Board Director / Development Committee Chair) has worked in public art administration since 1984. She has placed and promoted public art in central NC as the Public Art Consultant with the Raleigh-Durham International Airport for the renovation of Terminals 1 and 2, the Cemala Foundation, Action Greensboro and currently the Piedmont Triad International Airport and the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro‘s Public Art Endowment. She has managed many public art projects in her career working at Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Art for Transit in New York as the manager of the Permanent Art Program for the NYTA, LIRR and Metro-North Railroad, Program Coordinator for the City of Tampa’s Public Art Program and as a Project Coordinator for Miami-Dade County’s Art in Public Places. She received her Master’s Degree in Art History from Florida State University. She is past-president of the Board of Green Hill Center for NC Art and the Weatherspoon Art Museum Association.

In her practice, Elicia Epstein works across a variety of media, from sculpture and installation, to documentary photography and video, publication and collage. The objects and experiences Elicia creates serve as visual, physical and spiritual interventions. Whimsy and "nonsense" are essential to Elicia’s life and art practice; as a practicing Jewitch, magic and art are her sharpened tools for a more liberated future.

Kylee Jo recently finished her BFA in drawing from the University of Florida, and is still figuring out her identity as an artist. In her multi-media paintings and installations (which sometimes incorporate film and/or sound) she tends to use humorous modes such as cartoons and warped realities to present gendered stereotypes. Materials she uses range from crudely sewn fabrics, to used popcorn bags, horse stickers, and plaster.

Mimi Allin is a visual artist working with performance, photography and video. She uses her body as a visual territory for knowledge production, healing and exploration. Her practice is based in conceptual, performance art, photography and video. The practice’s conceptual intent seeks to activate a critical commentary on gender, power and human relationships. Allin’s work explores contemporary 4th wave feminist themes, encompassing oppressed/oppressor dynamics, the relationship between contemporary discourses about landscape and the self’s internal processes. Allin, while acknowledging death, also seeks paths of regeneration, opening a dialogue between relationship and function, in a proprietary culture that isolates the subject from its production. She reaches and teaches transformation by reclaiming her body and its charged relation to the landscape. The gestures in her work are poetic, ritual-based, seductive, fluid and playful. She falls cathartically in and out of rhythm with the world, aiming to elicit reflection and to disrupt the basic structures of things, real and imagined. 

Anne Wu is an established exhibiting artist working out of northern New Mexico. Curiosity inspires her to explore a variety of media and techniques to create dimensional objects and installations. The last decade has been spent primarily in cutting perfectly good pieces of fabric into very tiny pieces and sewing them back together.

Kyla Gilbert's practice investigates the changeability of matter and the fusion of organic materials and industrial products, in parallel to the human body within its environment. Coming from a background in performance, Kyla is drawn to the intersection between movement, design and building. Her main interest lies in materiality as it relates to domesticity and commodity/consumption. She's interested in the metaphorical and physical weight of the objects we surround ourselves with, and how our lived patterns act on and modify our environments and our bodies. Kyla builds using repurposed and found materials collected from her surroundings in an attempt to explore her connection to place whether it be temporary or for an extended period of time. 

Kyla created Someday My Prince Will Come.

Sareh Imani is an Iranian-born, multidisciplinary artist based in New York. Imani received an MFA in Painting from the University of Tehran and an MFA from the Parsons School of Design in New York. In her practice, Imani explores the ways of achieving resourcefulness, through care, mending, and healing in times of inadequacy. For the past 2 years, she has been making a series of videos that study the relation between virtual and visceral, borrowing from medical methodologies and exploring the reparative potentials of art and science, intimacy and distance, instructions and poetics.Imani has been exhibiting her work in group shows both in the US (New York, Austin), Europe (Venice, Gothenburg), and the Middle East (Tehran, Dubai). She is the recipient of the one-year A.I.R fellowship (2020), and the Skowhegan School of painting and sculpture scholarship in 2018. In addition, she participated in the MASS MoCA residency (2018), AIM program at the Bronx Museum (2018), BRIC Workspace Residency (2019), BRIC Media fellowship (2020), and NARS foundation (2020).

Adam Eckstrom is half of the artist collaborative, Ghost of a Dream, with Lauren Was. The collaborative’s work embodies the essence of opulence while being constructed of materials that typically end up in the trash. They mine popular culture searching for discarded materials that people use trying to reach their goals. Whether it is a Hollywood film that transports the viewer into a dream reality, a travel poster promising a luxurious vacation, or a lottery ticket that gives the possibility of a future full of rich decadence; they use these remnants to both re-create people’s dreams, and portray the dreamer. They have recently been included in exhibitions at the MAAM museum, Galerie Paris-Beijing, Crystal Bridges Museum, Telfair Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Dixon Gallery and Gardens Museum, Frist Center for Visual Arts, The Courtauld, and The Mint. Other recent solo exhibitions include CES Gallery, Smack Mellon, and 601Artspace. Ghost of a Dream has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue Magazine, Hyperallergic, BlouinArtinfo, ArtFCity, W Magazine, Interview Magazine, World of Interiors, VICE Art Talks as a documentary, and Southern Foodways alliance as a short film. To learn more about Adam and Ghost of a Dream's work, please visit their C.V. on their website.

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.