Nadia Phillips is an artist, designer, teacher and entrepreneur! African American the Beautiful Co. started with a concept and a hand drawing and was launched November 2017. She has been an educator, specializing for middle age students for the last 7 years and uses her degree in Entrepreneurship to inspire students towards owning there own businesses through creativity and art. Beyond that she is a wife to Quintin and a mother to Quintin Jr. and Aidan.

Ayan is a business strategist at BrightHouse, a creative consultancy that helps organizations uncover their timeless purpose — the reason they exist — so they can grow their people, profits, and social impact. She is also the founder of The Whole-Hearted, a social platform geared towards promoting a deep, meaningful connection with yourself, others, and the world at large. Fueled from the heart, Ayan also has a deep love for tea, world travel and yoga. You can find her at TheWhole-Hearted.com or on iG at @ayanzado

Debbie The Artist is a black, gender-queer, artist and educator who believes in the power of art and culture to empower marginalized voices through radical community based knowledge sharing. Debbie is currently enrolled as a student at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University where she studies Social Work and Music. She combine these two disciplines in an effort to serve community through artistic expression.

Roland is a North Carolina native—born in Asheville and currently living in Raleigh—who received a BFA in design and MFA in studio art from the University of North Carolina–Greensboro. As he describes his work, Roland “creates art that challenges ideas around controversial social and political constructs, and generates a safe space to process, question, and share.” He is the founder of the acclaimed Jumpsuit Project, intended to raise awareness around issues related to mass incarceration. The work grew out of personal history, from the ten months he spent in state prison on a wrongful conviction just as he had started his last year of grad school in 2013. Based on new evidence, Roland was exonerated of all charges in 2015. Back in school, he wanted to provoke conversation around issues related to incarceration, including prejudice toward those incarcerated—for his MFA thesis project, Roland wore an orange jumpsuit every day and documented his interactions until his graduation in spring 2017. He has shared the project around the country via speaking engagements at the University of Michigan Law School, Princeton University, and other educational institutions, and as a performance piece, most recently at LACE: Los Angeles, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and ARTSpace Raleigh.

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.

Julia Gutman is an emerging Australian artist, best known for her intricate textile sculptures and commitment to narrative installation. Her work spans textiles, sculpture, painting and prose, with a distinctive irreverence that permeates all forms. Her growing collection of sculptures and stories intersect and build on one and other, continually investigating themes of gender, mythology, religion and fashion. Equal parts pointed and absurd, abject and romantic, Julia’s work is a surreal investigation of cultural behaviors and systems of belief.

During Gutman's residency, she created Try Sitting On Me Now.

Kale Roberts is an explosion of queer sportsing energy with a laundry list of identities that informs their practice as a radical storyteller and sculptor. Blasting out of Tampa, FL, they activate SPACE in an art as life practice. One mouthful of the South, a dollop of blind fandom, and an abundance of misinformed history, they are dedicated to creating new rituals and objects imbued with humor and sincerity.

Comic books, the Bible belt, sports, fashion, and a slew of gender layers inform their practice. It is through this embodiment that infinite possibilities and the power of storytelling and vulnerability emerge.

In 2016 Tailgate Projects was incepted. Driving this rainbow hatchback truck with teeth and collaborative flags flapping in the wind, it is their conscious choice to live in full visibility combating toxic socialization through daily navigations.

Right outa the mouth of the truck bed Roberts hijacks rituals around food and celebration in collaboration with local artists and across the globe. Through this exchange they activate multiple voices and identities that become the catalyst for empathy and change.

Roberts created 100 sips, 4 ways to feed you, pole service during their residency.

Hale Ekinci is a Chicago-based Turkish interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor of Art at North Central College, teaching a variety of courses in the Digital Art field. She spent childhood and much of her young adult years in Turkey, the homeland that she brings in and out of focus throughout her works. She completed her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago. Focusing on pictorial histories, gender politics, and folk traditions, her works vary from non-linear narrative videos and mixed media paintings that are juxtaposed with craft to fiber installation. Her recent projects touch on social issues, cultural stereotypes, and political unrest. Despite the sometimes dismal nature of these controversial issues, her works are often playful as she uses vibrant colors, patterns, and hopeful moments.

During Ekinci's residency, she created Your Haint Blue is My Evil Eye: Making an Amulet.

Andrea Vail is interested in the emphasis that American culture places on amassing stuff in pursuit of happiness and the ironic emptiness to which it leads. Hinged on textile traditions and techniques, her practice materializes as sculpture, installation, and collaborative exchange. Vail is an artist, teacher, and facilitator based in Charlotte, NC. She is the recipient of the ASC Regional Project Grant; North Carolina Arts Council Visual Artist Fellowship (2016-17); Happenings CLT Visual Artist Grant; CultureWORKS Richmond Arts and Cultural District MicroGrant; and residencies at Goodyear Arts, McColl Center for Art + Innovation. She is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University (MFA).

During Vail's residency, she created Signalling-Hello (Greensboro).

Milla Toukkari is a visual artist from Helsinki, Finland. She has graduated with an MFA and MoA, majoring in printmaking and design. Her works are indebted to the transformative and transitional processes essential to printmaking, even though the pieces also involve elements from photography, writing, and installation. Nonetheless, the ever-fleeing and ultimately deconstructive nature of the printed image is in the core of her philosophical and artistic interests.Important, reoccurring and very much cherished concepts in her practice include (the politics of) archive, (constructed) memory, and the ontology of and the otherness in the (printed) image.

She has contributed to a publication touching the notion of the expended field of printmaking, published in 2017 by the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland.

Toukkari is a serious but seriously slow thinker.

During Toukkari's residency, they created Lover's Ear.

Spencer Merolla studied religion as an undergraduate and had embarked on a career in academia before finding her way back to her first love, visual art. Her work explores the social practices and material culture of grief and remembrance through various affectively-charged materials.

During Merolla's residency, she created Album Amicorum.

Alejandro Franco’s work is a quest to find a new function for discarded objects, to give them a new role, a new life. In an industrial landscape where made objects and information flows overwhelm us, he finds fulfillment in building characters out of various objects that were previously resting without purpose. Seeking hidden similarities between objects and in parallel striving to interpret thoughts are his great passions. He feels a need to intervene with these forgotten elements, to work with their poetic potential and create a convergence engaging people with their new existence. A seamless search for beauty, sifting through the detritus of everyday life.

During Franco's residency, he created Live Streaming.

lydia see is a multidisciplinary practitioner, educator, and curator of art + archives who is passionate about the uses of art for social justice + civic engagement. Working primarily at the intersections of photography with fiber/object/craft/performance, her practice involves material and conceptual investigation through research and collection and is rooted in history: literal and conceptual, local and global, intimate and environmental, personal and anonymous.

Through processes of collecting, arranging, stitching, weaving, photographing, re-photographing, and combining, the archive is reinterpreted in mundane domestic materials, accumulations, and outdated media to draw connections between memory, ephemerality and changes in technology. In her social practice she advises as a creative consultant and strategist with a focus on inclusive and accessible interpretive collateral and expanded engagement.

During see's residency, she created The Records Room.

Kimberly Lyle’s work explores our human relationships to systems of language, communication, learning, and technology. Within each of these systems she often uses translation as a strategy for understanding the movement of meaning - between languages, between people, between mediums. By questioning these larger structures in often personal ways, she hopes to better understand how they come to shape our identity, relationships to each other, and perceptions of the world.

During Lyle's residency, she created Staircase Score.

Sidney Stretz is an artist and educator originally from Columbia, MO. She received her MFA from the California College of Arts and her BFA from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Stretz makes work about everyday struggles, strange social situations, and failure. As an artist she works to highlight and improve circumstances and situations that others may not feel are valid or important. Through attempts to build community and mutual benefit, she develops a sense of engagement with a wide variety of groups of people that are looking for creative solutions to their community-based dreams. Sidney likes the Titanic, dogs, and making pies.

Stretz is currently an artist-in-residence for the Southern Constellations 2018: Rural Residency in Rockingham County–an Elsewhere Elsewhere project in partnership with the Reckon Holler Homestead.

During her residency with Elsewhere Goes To Madison at Reckon Holler, Stretz created Instructions On Waving.

Adam Carlin is a social practice artist that lives and works in Greensboro, North Carolina. He is currently the Director of Greensboro Project Space, a contemporary art center at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Program Director for the Community Arts Collaborative where he creates and oversees community engaged projects for the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and advances partnerships between the college and the community. He is also co-Founder and co-Director of Creek Colleges, an organization that creates schools on the banks of rivers, lakes, and creeks that are going through active restoration. Carlin is interested in creating opportunities for formalized social interactions that take the form of institutes which constructs projects that highlight under-recognized histories, idiosyncratic activities, and public dynamics. Participation and collaboration are integral to his practice and he often work site and situation-specifically. It is common that he as a large variety of projects and institutes going on at one time which occasionally connect and cross, creating systems of engaged research and production. He received a BFA from California College of the Arts and is currently pursuing his MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University.

During his residency with Elsewhere Goes To Madison at Reckon Holler, Carlin created Project #1 and Project #2.

ABCIV: a new breed of designer, the Animist, who channels the voice of the material, which speaks in the silence. CloudBank Productions: a multi-format media group portraying People & Places in Time. Floating Circus: in collaboration with Amazon Annie, a celebration of rare individuals & their incredible talents.

During his residency with Elsewhere Goes To Madison at Reckon Holler, Cousins (ABCIV) created These Madison Times!

Amazon Annie has made a career out of wrestling; she is a self-made producer, performer and promoter who has thrown a decade's worth of concept parties in NYC.

As a fabricator and designer, she has built a wide array of installations from wrestling rings to mud pits. Her events include public participation as well as staged performances. Working alongside Avery Cousins, the 'Floating Circus' had its debut last August, and was her first foray into a more traditional circus theme. For more: August 2012 issue of The New Yorker.

During her residency with Elsewhere Goes To Madison at Reckon Holler, Amazon Annie created Memory Lane Photo Booth.

Tiny polished pieces of nature, shipped long distances to wait. Lying lazily on markets that look incredibly alike, eventually becoming someone’s pocket fortune or nightstand reassurance. Nelly-scented incense and Icelandic glacial water tapped on bottles with a cool sticker. 15 missed calls and they say eating blue smarties while wearing Crocs shoes causes immediate cancer. Ásgerður Birna Björnsdóttir is a visual artist busy with making sense of the abundance of materials around her.

Hannah Lewis is a visual artist, vintage clothing seller, and treasure hunter born and raised in southwest Florida. Organizing her embarrassingly large troll doll collection, restoring old clothing, and searching for bizarre objects to include in her next artwork are just a few of her favorite pastimes.

Lewis's sculptural works explore how branding and media influence the ways in which we identify ourselves and behave. She is especially interested in the (oftentimes toxic) relationship between marginalized consumers and objects of consumption. Forced to grapple with a socio-political climate that isn't always hospitable for fat women of color, Lewis imagines a future where her differences are both recognized and celebrated.

During her residency at Elsewhere, Lewis created Dress-Up.