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.

Gary Heidt (born Houston, Texas 1970) is a conceptual artist, experimental poet, musician, librettist, literary agent, and co-founder of Lovesphere, a 67-year performance project initiated in 1996, and more recently, the Perceiver of Sound League.

Vickie Aravindhan is a queer Indian-Chinese Singaporean artist, curator, big eater, and sometimes singer based in Los Angeles exploring the ramifications of assimilation and hybridization as a result of colonial diaspora and the functions of myth as history, codes and truth. She mainly works with, video, installation and sculpture. Never opposed to play, experimenting, dialogue and building community.

Lexy Ho-Tai is a multi-discplinary visual artist and teaching artist, interested in the intersection between art-making and making the world a better place. She disrupts the exclusive and elitist tendencies of the art world by working in non-traditional art spaces, repurposing discarded and recycled materials, collaborating with artists working across multiple disciplines, and engaging with diverse audiences. Through soft sculptures, performance, installation, murals, and workshops, her public and participatory practice employs humor, play, and absurdity to invite viewers to contemplate pressing social and environmental issues. She believes that joy is a radical act of resistance, and that play forges a powerful space for audiences to envision and work towards alternative futures.

Abigail Rothman (b. 1997, Phoenix, Arizona) is a multidisciplinary artist and activist exploring subversion. Her work challenges and critiques tradition within society, art history, and its political and social manifestations. Through digital and physical abstraction pre-existing content is removed from its’ original context, existing as objects and realities the viewer must confront.  Acknowledging and altering the relationship between people and these scenarios confronts the conventional understanding and priorities of traditional art making processes. In turn, questioning the social transparency and accessibility of knowledge as a reflection of extreme political and social hierarchies. 

Born and raised in Lexington, North Carolina, Jaleel Cheek has fostered his passion for dance since age seven. In his hometown studio, Jaleel began taking technique classes during high school and went on to study Dance and Performance at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Jaleel has been involved with Elsewhere for over a decade as a regular Extravaganza performer, host of Open Stage, and other projects.

Communications Manager

Jordan T. Robinson is a North Carolina-based artist and emerging curator, who runs a creative services brand to help the community, called JTR Presents. Thanks to the support he received from his family, Robinson cultivated a love for the Arts that later inspired him to attend North Carolina A&T State University, where he obtained his degree in Media Design. Soon after, Robinson enrolled in Savanna College of Art & Design to further the administrative skill sets he developed from producing exhibitions independently.

Jordan Wason (J.R.) is an artist from New Jersey, living in New York, who animates objects, co-hosts happenings where art is destroyed, and plays music. He constantly shuffles himself between the three. All his creations journal his attempts at making meaning through absurdity, the rawness of improvisation, and the discovery of narrative within spaces and things.

Chris Omni, MPH, affectionately known as The Health Hippie, is a multi-disciplinary, award-winning entrepreneur, scholar, and artist who exclusively and unapologetically focuses on the health and wellbeing of Black women. Chris’s life is woven in between the words of Audre Lorde, “Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”

Richie Moreno is an emerging artist from Miami, Florida. He creates sculptural work which is then used in sound performances in the hopes of finding magic. As a guitarist and artist he's interested in distortion, how things can get bent, warped, and stretched inside the mind to build meaning, and moments of heightened awareness.

Jasmine Best is a true Southern Artist, gathering narratives from her Carolinian family and childhood. The North Carolina based artist uses her personal memories and manipulations of her memories to create dialogues about the black female identity in the south and in predominately white spaces. Her work often depicts maternal figures, each depicting the diversity and qualities that make up the black southern women in her life through several generations.

Based in Vienna, Austria, OMAi and the Tagtool Crew lead public art projection events and collaborative light painting workshops around the world.

Markus Dorninger is a digital artist and designer. His work comprises projection interventions as well as stage performances. He invented Tagtool to bring to life the images that inhabit our imagination.

Josef Dorninger is a true-to-the-game Tagtoolista who takes care of business at OMAi. With his extensive experience as youth worker and workshop leader, he explores the educational benefits of creative projectionism.

Matthias Fritz is an active VJ who joined forces with the Dorninger brothers. As a versatile visualist with a strong community focus, he has taught Tagtool to thousands around the world.

William Plummer is fascinated by the way objects can reflect culture, and by extension, a sense of place and belonging. As a gender non-binary individual with American and Taiwanese heritage, they live an experience that falls between standard lines of definition. Their most recent work concerns generational archive, using laborious processes such as beading and weaving to both celebrate lineage and mitigate cultural dissonance.

Mahedi Anjuman is on a journey to find her authentic artistic self through a contemporary avant-garde way. Currently she is living Reno, NV. She was born in Bangladesh, the land of the mystics. Anjuman was selected to represent Bangladeshi contemporary art in an International Contemporary Sculpture and Installation Exhibition OPEN 15 in Italy with artist Yoko Ono (2012). She was accepted to participate in an artist residency program with Transart Institute in 2013 and Picture Berlin in 2018 in Germany. She is researching on contemporary conceptual art related with existential philosophy and experimenting sculpture, video art and performance art. She is curious about being’s psychological impact on action-reaction.

Craig Deppen Auge is an artist currently residing in Kansas City, Missouri. His works explore the relationship between material, shape, color, gesture, mark-making, site and self. He merges and flows between collage, alternative bookmaking, salvage assemblage, and impromptu public intervention. Ephemeral, formal explorations reflect through-lines of self, and potentially activate collective deja-vu. Craig previously attended the ON::VIEW Residency at Sulfur Studios in Savannah, GA. He is a 2019-2020 Charlotte Street Foundation Studio Resident in Kansas City

David Alpert is an artist and curator living and working in Kansas City. He likes interactions, connections, and exploring feelings. He believes in listening compassionately to yourself and others. Through a visual dialogue, he promotes and researches his interests and beliefs.

Alyzza (they/them) is an angelic troublemaker, moving in the lineage of cultural workers and popular educators. They bring 15 years of experience in building community centered creations from the ground up in Greensboro. From helping bring the first participatory budgeting process to the south with PB Greensboro, curating over a dozen community engaged murals with Greensboro Mural Project (gso_murals), to helping steward local mutual aid efforts as part of Greensboro Mutual Aid (@gso_mutual_aid), they move with a commitment to cultivating the commons and building a transformative and just future.⁠

Alexandra Joye Warren is a native of the Washington, D.C. Metro area. She received her BA degree in Drama with a concentration in Dance/Pre-Medicine from Spelman College and her received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance Performance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Alexandra performed, choreographed, and taught in New York performing with Christal Brown's INSPIRIT, a dance company. Alexandra has been fortunate to work on projects with Urban Bush Women, Bill T. Jones in FELA!, Paloma and Patricia McGregor’s Angela’s Pulse, Maxine Montilus, Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, Maverick Dance Experience, and Van Dyke Dance Group. Now based in Greensboro, NC, JOYEMOVEMENT, was launched in 2014. Alexandra is married to Hashim Warren and mother to Madison and Moses. Alexandra is an Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at Elon University.

Sophie Sanders’ paintings, prints, and fiber works use gesture and iconic imagery to convey the inner potency and tenacity of her subjects. In recent works, she visualizes a space of feminist sanctuary, where individuals can find a sense of restoration and rejuvenation. Other works explore interconnectivity through the visual metaphor of a mandala, the human eye, and brain.

Charis Fleshner is a mixed media visual artist who calls Colorado home, along with Goober cat, the best and worst studio assistant ever. Charis was accepted into University of New Mexico's MFA program under painting and drawing but rebelled against categorization and fell in love with soft sculpture there instead. She is inspired by the middle schoolers she currently teaches art and fiber arts to, color, play, fabric, and intersectional feminism.