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.

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.

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.⁠

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.

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.

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.

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.

Amelia Nura is a senior at UNCG, majoring in Photography and Media Studies. She is an interdisciplinary artist with a curiosity for uncovering psychological and social fabrications of identity and interpersonal relationships. Her fascination with uncovering truth and providing a platform for lives and narratives that are often neglected or misrepresented, manifests itself primarily through photography and film, where spaces and emotions are built into scaled-down worlds of light, sound and action, to communicate our constructed realities. Amelia likes journaling, night walks, Suspiria and Black Sabbath (minus the Dio years).

Programs 2016-2019

Gui Villalba Portel is a Greensboro-based storyteller, theatre artist, and arts organizer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. An indigenous latinx and undocumented queer, Gui often thinks about visualizing: the amplification of marginalized narratives, collective deviation within social constructs, and "new" recipes.

Emily Ensminger, born in Durham, NC, is a conceptual artist and advocate for independent multi-use live/work organizations. Through programming, textiles and functional systems, Emily’s work addresses necessity as a creative practice operating at the intersection of admin, art, and daily life. Curatorial, project coordination and presentation focus is on experimental production and organizations outside art centers.

Emily led the organization as Creative Director (2018-2020).