Mia Cinelli
Mia Cinelli is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and educator. Driven by curiosity and informed by design methodologies, her practice produces a variety of creative outcomes— including digital typefaces, discursive objects, public installations, and sewn sculptures. In all of her work, she is most interested in designing experiences which engender meaningful interactions and discussions. She’s fascinated by language, longing, history, gesture, and corporeality.
Rosa Nussbaum
Rosa Nussbaum is a British/German visual artist based in Austin, Texas. Rosa works at the intersection of performance and sculpture, of object and objectification. Her work explores the place where the (female) body touches the institution, submitting to it’s projected desires.
During Nussbaum’s residency, she created Keeping Young & Living Longer: How to stay Active & Healthy past 100, or How to avoid Life Shortening Errors with fellow Kevin Brophy.
Michelle Lisa Polissaint
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
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 Laurel Caramat
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.
Alma L. Leiva
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).
Josh T. Franco
Josh T. Franco is an artist with an art history Ph.D. He often builds or suggests environments that invite haunting by ancestors and disincarnate peers. Enfleshed folks are invited into these settings to share stories with Franco and make something new together, be it physical, experiential, or spiritual. He is devoted to handwriting, printed text, and beeswax as mediums that can command visual attention and physical space while also transmitting and preserving knowledge between generations. Franco is guided by the understanding that art history is made by hand.
During Franco’s residency, he created PICTURES ELSEWHERE combines three acts of reverent and irreverent gratitude to art historian Michael Baxandall and Elsewhere matriarch Sylvia Gray.
Lonnie Holley
Lonnie Holley was born on February 10, 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama. From the age of five, Holley worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking. He lived in a whiskey house, on the state fairgrounds, and in several foster homes. His early life was chaotic and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood.
Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. His art and music, born out of struggle, hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity, has manifested itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound. Holley’s sculptures are constructed from found materials in the oldest tradition of African American sculpture. Objects, already imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, are combined into narrative sculptures that commemorate places, people, and events. His work is now in collections of major museums throughout the country, on permanent display in the United Nations, and been displayed in the White House Rose Garden. In January of 2014, Holley completed a one-month artist-in-residence with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva Island, Florida, site of the acclaimed artist’s studio...Read More.
During Holley’s residency, he created Mixed.
Daniel B. Coleman
Daniel B. Coleman (he/they) lives a life-project centered life that de-compartmentalizes his work as an artist, scholar, and organizer between the U.S. South (NC) and the Mexican South (Chiapas). Each of these elements are an integral part of who he is in the world. Daniel is an Assistant Professor in Women's and Gender Studies at UNC Greensboro, a performance artist and choreographer and a transfeminist and abolitionist organizer. As an artist, Daniel has taught and performed throughout México, the U.S. and Canada, as well as in Costa Rica, Brazil, Colombia, Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, Greece, The Netherlands, Poland, and Estonia.
During Coleman’s residency, they created Warriors: Beyond Unicorns and Erasures.
william cordova
william cordova's work attempts to reconcile ideas of displacement and transition through the use of alchemy, ephemeral residue and vernacular architecture that continually shifts and shapes what could be described as our contemporary situation.During his residency at Elsewhere, Cordova created untitled: or obsneerg y las cronicas marcianas.
Rontherin Ratliff
Rontherin Ratliff is known for creating textural assemblages and sculptural work that examines contemporary society. In 2009, Works and Process at the Guggenheim NYC commissioned the set installation for the production of Peter and the Wolf of which Ratliff lead the artistic direction and co-creation.
In 2010 Ratliff exhibited at Diverse Works in Houston Texas and in 2012 the Arts Council of New Orleans commissioned a site-specific art installation for The Norman Mayer Branch Library. Ratliff has exhibited at Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, Rebecca Randall Bryan Gallery at Coastal Carolina University SC and was selected for the Joan Mitchell Foundations Artist In Residence Program in New Orleans in 2014. He was a collaborating artist for the nationally acclaimed street art installation ExhibitBe New Orleans.In 2015, the Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator and NPN/VAN awarded Ratliff with an artist residency in Miami, FL. His commitment to his practice lead him co-found Level Artist Collective with local artist of color living in New Orleans. In 2016 Ratliff exhibited at Governors Island New York, 516 ARTS, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA and was a recipient of the Adeline Edwards Founders Award along with a Blights Out artist fellowship. In 2017 Ratliff exhibited at Xavier University Gallery at Xavier University and Carroll Gallery at Tulane University in New Orleans and was invited to the Netherlands where he created an outdoor installation in response to the 1717 charismas flood.During his residency at Elsewhere, Ratliff created Rosa No. 7 Yellow Independence.
Zeelie Brown
Zeelie Brown is a visual artist and cellist who through sound, textiles, and installations depth charges wells of Afro-Atlantic dynamism to conjure up works which provoke a sense of environmental and cultural shift. Her work meditates black freedom in the 21st century, and the renegotiation of the parasitic networks of power and privilege weft into the global, colonial world order. She was born in San Antonio and was raised between there and Pollard, Alabama. She graduated from Oberlin College with a BA in Africana Studies (Fine Arts) which they used to open their heart and soul to jazz, philosophy, and other great arts of the black world.
During her residency at Elsewhere, Brown created Fear No Joy.
Ash Eliza Smith
Ash Smith is a director, designer and new media artist who grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina. Ash incorporates strategies of play and speculation to solve problems, re-imagine systems and build worlds—to create interactive stories, mixed reality experiences, simulations and prototypes of the future. Data, science and/or humor may be used to tell stories for film, stage, and improvisation that may blur the distinction between art & life, fact & fiction, and nature & technology—a liminal space—that considers how myth and history modulate a present reality while simultaneously engendering future dreams. Ash is interested in the dreaming collective and how these virtual shared spaces may bleed into the real and shape our co-existence. Ash also plays music in a few bands and loves to parallel park.
During 2017 their residency at Elsewhere, Smith created 11½ Spells for Our Future Selves. In 2019 Ash was the resident artist for the 2019 Rural Residency in Appalachia and created Southern Devices//Appalachian Futures.
Saba Taj
Saba Taj is a Southern Muslim artist and activist based in Durham NC. Heavily inspired by Islamic stories and speculative fiction, Saba uses mixed media practices to illustrate the liminalities of diasporic identity through the creation of hybridized femme-monsters. Taj remixes cultural references from her South Asian, American, Muslim, and queer identities, and explores themes of diaspora, inherited trauma and apocalypse.
During her residency at Elsewhere, Taj created Interstellar Uber/Negotiations with God.
Maria Molteni
Maria Molteni is a Nashville/Boston based multimedia & performing artist, educator & organizer. Her practice sprung from formalist roots in painting and printmaking and has grown to incorporate research, participation, and spiritual experimentation. From fiber to found-object sculpture, painting to movement, performance to publication, she employs tactile and tactical processes per their ability to manifest elaborate conceptual orchestration and intuitive synaesthetic provocation. Exploring iterations of sport, craft, feminism, animism, glossolalia, urban planning, and more she takes interest in standardized systems that influence ritual in everyday functionality. She playfully asks audiences to imagine her serving Black Mountain College as a PE coach : )
During her residency at Elsewhere, Molteni created Revolving Spectrum.
Charisse Pearlina Weston
Charisse Pearlina Weston is a Houston-based artist and writer. Her work focuses on the deconstruction and reconfiguration of language, representation, and history through the manipulation of various mediums including video, photography, and printed text. She has exhibited and performed in various venues including Project Row Houses, the Lawndale Art Center, and DiverseWorks, and has participated in residencies at Alabama Song Houston, Sunblossom Residency (organized by Carrie Schneider), Vermont Studio Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has received awards from the Artadia Fund for the Arts, the Santo Foundation, the Sally Mead Hands Foundation, and the Dallas Museum of Art's Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund. She will be attending the University of California-Irvine as a MFA in Art candidate this Fall.
During her residency at Elsewhere, Weston created Politics Surrounded.
Antoine Williams
Antoine Williams creates mixed media assemblage installations, paintings and collages, which are an investigation of identity, semiotics and social structures. Heavily influenced by speculative science fiction (specifically social science fiction and cosmic horror), hip hop, plus his rural working class upbringing in Red Springs, North Carolina, Antoine has created his own mythology of hybrid creatures that exist between the boundaries of class and race. Antoine is an Assistant Professor of Art at Guilford College.
During his residency at Elsewhere, Williams created Because They Believe in Unicorns.
Cosmo Whyte
Cosmo Whyte is a Jamaican-born, trans-disciplinary artist who employs drawing, performance, and sculpture to create conceptual work that explores how notions of identity are disrupted by migration—particularly migration as an unfinished arc of motion whose final resting point remains an open-ended question. He situates his work in the liminal space between early culture shock and final acclimatization. Cosmo's creative process begins through the interrogation of his own body and the personal memories that are embedded within it. He uses this archive as his entry point into collective political interrogations.
During his residency at Elsewhere, Whyte created Guess Who is Coming to Dinner.
Jane Cassidy
Jane Cassidy is a multi-disciplinary artist from Galway, Ireland and is currently is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. In 2008 she earned a Masters in Music and Media Technologies from Trinity College Dublin and in 2014 a MFA in Digital Art from Tulane University, New Orleans. Cassidy’s primary work is based around site-specific audio-visual installations with a focus on creating meditative, immersive environments. Past performances include the European Media Art Festival, Germany, the New Orleans Film Festival, Punto Y Raya Festival, Spain, Currents New Media, Sante Fe, Arts Council New Orleans LUNA Fete and group shows in Dublin, Galway, New Orleans, Atlanta and Philadelphia. Cassidy has had solo shows at the 53rd Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan, and at Tulane University and PARSE Gallery in New Orleans.
During her residency at Elsewhere, Cassidy created We Went Down To O'Shea's Woods.
Jessica Gaynelle Moss
Jessica Gaynelle Moss is an artist, writer and entrepreneur.As an ardent advocate for artists, arts education and communities of color, in 2016 she founded The Roll Up, a national network of art incubators embedded in neighborhoods across the United States. Prior, she served as the Creative Director of the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, NC and earlier, on the senior management team of Rebuild Foundation in Chicago, IL.In addition to her numerous management and leadership roles, Jessica continues to practice as an artist. Her work--often focused on race, class and accessibility--is in private and public collections across the United States including the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) Baltimore, the University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC), and the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection (JFABC) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her curatorial projects include 2018’s ‘Black Blooded’ at the New Gallery of Modern Art in Charlotte, NC, which presented the work of 50 interdisciplinary artists from Kerry James Marshall to Sherrill Roland-- and the 2016 exhibition ‘1975 Paintings: Noah Davis’ at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, IL.
Jessica received a bachelors in Painting, Drawing and Printmaking from Carnegie Mellon University; a masters in Arts Administration, Policy and Management from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and a masters in Studies of the Law from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
Her interests in innovation, activism and collaboration continue to influence her projects today.
During Moss' residency, she created The ABOVEGROUND RAILROAD Scholarship.