Ali Aschman creates hand-made worlds exploring emotional states. Hybridity, transformation, alienation and guilt are recurring themes. Her practice includes animation, installation, drawing and printmaking. She experiments with narrative forms through moving and still images, kinetic and static objects and sculptural tableaux. Aschman earned a BA from the University of Cape Town and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ali Aschman’s residency is supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Judith Parker is a curator, writer and art historian who lives in Canada’s capital, Ottawa. The city is named after indigenous traders, the Odawa, who met explorers traveling the Kitchesippi River. Judith curates interdisciplinary contemporary exhibitions in non-traditional places where artists can respond to specific cultural sites or historic artifacts. Every August, she creates collaborative performance in the Canadian wilderness with R. Murray Schafer’s Wolf Project. In 2014, Beyond the Edge: Artists’ Gardens presented five outdoor plant-based installations addressing its location at Agriculture Canada’s Central Experimental Farm. As former curator at the historic Bytown Museum, Judith initiated Artist-in-Residence solo exhibitions presenting contemporary art in dialogue with Victorian-era artifacts.

I was born an artist. My beginning years were spent in a small community of black people who had come to Southern Ontario from the Southern U.S.A. My parents were married in 1951 and brought in and questioned by the Morality Squad of the Hamilton Police Dept. since mesegenation(the mixing of the races) was still against the law. I graduated from a comprehensive Arts High School and moved from Hamilton to Toronto were I graduated with honors from The Ontario College of Art and Design. I moved to Vancouver and became part of a small but intence live Arts and Music scene. From there I started researching Black Spiritual Practices through Slave Cultures and have lived and worked in Cuba, Haiti and the U.K. I was one of two Canadian artists invited to participate in the 1st International Arts Biennale in Johannesburg, South Africa after the official end of aparthied and met Nelson Mandela seven months after his electon. My work is an on going learning process and I have become interested in the enviroment and the use of recoverable materials and objects as building materials. This has become an important part of my process. For more info. www.janwade.com

Brenda Oelbaum is the current President of the Women's Caucus for Art, a national organization that supports women in the arts by creating community through art, education and social activism. As a multidisciplinary conceptual artist, Oelbaum works in whatever medium best suits her mission. For the past 10 years she has been focusing on taking down the 66 billion diet industry, turning diet books into art that will educate viewers about disordered eating, and an industry that thrives on personal failure, promoting low self-image and body loathing. She feels strongly that it is the Diet Industry that has created the so called "Obesity Epidemic," and believes in the principles of Health at Every Size (HAES)

Margaret Bowes (b. 1986) is a Canadian visual artist, writer and traveler, whose many activities involve exploring the friction between land and identity. Often traveling throughout border zones, resource-based economies and shifting channels, her practice opens up a space between landscape and the contemporaneity of colonization. An ongoing part of her practice involves immersing herself in these first-hand experiences, like fieldwork. For the past nine years Margaret has worked in seasonal forestry in Northern British Columbia to offset the costs of producing artwork. In the process she has become highly attached to, and inspired by, the diverse pockets of nomadic subcultures that travel according to season and economic flux. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Art from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, has exhibited nationally and has had works published in Canada and Australia. She has attended artist residencies at Nes Residency (Skagaströnd, Iceland) and Full Tilt (Newfoundland, Canada).

Taylor Tower is a storyteller and teacher based in Minneapolis by way of Montreal. Her writing has been featured on CBC’s WireTap with Jonathan Goldstein and Roman Mars’ Public Radio Remix, as well as on nerve.com and elsewhere. She was thrilled and honored to participate in The Moth GrandSLAM in St. Paul in June 2014, where the audience went wild, just like her mom said they would. She has taught storytelling workshops to students of all ages through Quebec Writers’ Federation and The Loft Literary Center. You can read more and listen to her radio voice at taylorgtower.com.

Evanthia Afstralou has received her BA degree from Wimbledon College of the Arts in London. Her videos are short clips of ‘the choreography of everyday life’. Through directing people to perform everyday activities such as tying their shoes, making coffee, flossing their teeth these activities are then turned into art, offering a different perspective, adding importance to the unimportant – from object making to working as an ‘observer’ that ‘makes nothing  happen’ based on the ideas of non interference, exploring non objectified materials. ‘I think that these moments have something to do with art, if someone looks for it. But, I don’t know, I am just looking for the mouse at the back of the room that is not there...’

Elizabeth Hamilton has a multi-disciplinary practice, primarily focusing on installation, sculpture and photography.  She lives and works in Philadelphia.

Laura Bigger is a multimedia artist whose work addresses the various relationships that exist among humans, animals, and ecosystems, particularly in terms of the food chain, raw materials, and the human tendency to exert control over natural systems. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where she currently resides. Prior to graduate school, Bigger lived off the grid in subtropical New Zealand, serving as a family’s cook, gardener, and nanny, which proved to be a formative experience. She aspires to integrate urban permaculture into her life as an artist.

Ma Li is an installation artist and sculptor who explores dichotomies of time, culture, and nature through the use of nontraditional art media and discarded materials such as fabric, plastic, and paper. Originally from Fuzhou, China, Li formulates dreamlike worlds that are influenced in part by her background in choreography and experience with communist calisthenics. Li graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Shanghai Dong Hua University and received a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited in galleries including A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, Gallery 825 in Los Angeles, and SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, CA. She was awarded Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards and Vermont Studio Center fellowship. Li currently lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Jasper Lee makes installations that evoke a metaphysical, self-reflective and ceremonial purpose.  These deeply immersive constructions explore the relationships between humankind and nature, between the spirit world and physical world, between past and present.

A musical soundtrack, sometimes produced with instruments of his own making, often accompanies these visual projects as a vehicle for further transportation to an inner, mythical dimension.  This mythical realm is where his work operates and where rational logic is left behind.

Leah Hamby is an interdisciplinary alchemist and creative instigator who hails from an enchanted farmland north of Birmingham, Alabama. Through her studies of the Social Sciences, music and foreign language, and through an experience with folk traditions both from her rural Southern upbringing and from living abroad in Mexico and Brazil, she feels inspired to design and re-interpret old and new community rituals through ceremony, installation, performance, and music. She invites everyone to "come on in and fix you a plate!”

Hillerbrand+Magsamen are a collaborative husband and wife visual artist team comprised of Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen. Based in Houston, Texas their interdisciplinary projects explore family identity, everyday interactions and consumer culture. They often work with their two children, pets and home. Hillerbrand+Magsamen have presented their videos in international film and media festivals and their photographs and installations have been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums. They have been awarded grants from the Austin Film Society, Ohio Arts Council, Houston Arts Alliance and Houston Center for Photography. Hillerbrand+Magsamen received a 2013/14 Houston Airport Systems video commission and their videos and photographs are in numerous collections including the Portland Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Stephan Hillerbrand is an Associate Professor at the University of Houston and Mary Magsamen is the Curator at Aurora Picture Show.

Lee's work explores animal protagonists and the emotional spaces and physical landscapes where humans and animals co-habitate. Circulatory systems, ecological processes and ideas of flow, immersion, and convergence inform much of her work.

Lee Deigaard graduated from Yale University with a major in fine arts and earned graduate degrees from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design and from the University of Texas at Austin where she held a Michener Fellowship in Creative Writing. In 2012 she won the Clarence John Laughlin Award for her series of nocturnal photographs of animals "Unbidden". In 2013, she had solo shows of site-specific installations at the Alexandria Museum of Art, the Acadiana Center for the Arts, the University of New Orleans, and the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans. Her solo show of photography "Trespass" and her video installation “PULSE” were on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2014. Her work has been featured on National Geographic's blog PROOF. She is a member of the New Orleans-based artist collective The Front. Some of her curations there include the group shows "PhotoBOMB", "You Beautiful Bitch", and "Latin for Crab".

Nsenga Knight is a interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Much of her work utilizes archive, memoir, and documentary materials, and expands upon the common aesthetic and theoretical concerns of the conceptual arts movement of the late 1960s and 70s, minimalism, Islamic geometrical art and other systems-based works. Through a restless hybridization of artistic practices she mobilizes a play with language and form and act as disruptive intervener and ardent preservationist. Knight has held residencies at Artspace in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Galveston Artist Residency (Galveston, TX), Brandywine Workshop (Philadelphia, PA), and Film/ Video Arts (New York, NY), and has been awarded with fellowships and grants from the Philadelphia Independent Film and Video Association, the Leeway Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, Brooklyn Historical Society, and the Puffin Foundation LTD. She has participated in recent solo and group exhibitions at Project Rowhouses in Houston, TX, Artspace in Raleigh, NC, Galveston Arts Center in Texas, MoCADA, New Museum and MoMA PS1 in New York. Knight earned a Bachelor of Arts in Film at Howard University and a Masters of Fine Arts degree at the University of Pennsylvania. During her residency at Elsewhere, Knight created Make Safe, Make Space.

Laura Davis (b. 1971, Holland, Michigan) is a Chicago based artist working in sculpture, drawing and installation. Her work examines the intersection of craft, design and art by using display structures to conflate notions of value and context. Davis’ recent solo exhibitions include Unknown Pleasures at Chicago Artist’s Coalition (coinciding with her 2012-2013 Bolt residency there) and the upcoming site specific installation, Histrionic Renovation, in the Mies van der Rohe McCormick house at Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL. Her work has been featured in the group exhibitions Homebodies at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Two Histories of the World (Part 2) at Hyde Park Art Center, both in Chicago, IL. She’s been reviewed by the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Rhizome.org and Artwrit. Abraham Ritchie listed her work in the “Top 10 of 2011,” for Art Slant and Jason Foumberg selected her as a 2013 “Breakout Artist” for Newcity. Davis received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2004, her BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art in 1996 and teaches in the department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Martha Whittington’s constructed environments speak to the tenderness and innocence of the human spirit as it faces the harshness and treachery of life and labor. By recreating the history of significant objects and ideas such as manual tools, antique devices, and life experiences of laborers, she builds an immersive experience. This new view of life and labor asks the audience to re-examine concepts, archetypal associations and connotations. Whittington has been the recipient of artist residencies at the Bemis Center in Omaha Nebraska and the Hambidge Center-Creative Arts in Rabun Gap Georgia. In support of her work, she has been awarded grants from the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia (WAP), Office of Cultural Affairs Atlanta and Austin Green. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally with shows at Moot Gallery, Hong Kong, Dans Kamera Istanbul, Turkey, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville Florida, Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, and the AMOA-Laguna Gloria Austin Texas. Whittington received her B.F.A. in Sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute. She received her M.F.A. in Sculpture From Tyler School of Art.

Justus Harris (he/they) is a healthcare design strategist, artist, educator, and the founder of MedSculp. MedSculp specializes in the development and consultation of data visualization, user experience, and patient communication strategies for healthcare institutions. Justus and MedSculp’s interactive health communication installations have been commissioned by the American Diabetes Association (Chicago, IL), the European Commission (Berlin, Germany), and The Kennedy Center (Washington, DC).

He is a Stanford Medicine X 2019 ePatient Scholar and guest teacher, and a 2018-2019 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow.

Justus's superpower is his community of peers in healthcare, technology, art, design. Microphones have never scared him and his engagements include speaking at Stanford University (San Francisco, CA), Livongo (Mountain View, CA), The Kennedy Center, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), and The Economic Club of Chicago (Chicago, IL). Most importantly Justus is a human being. Music is his primary go-to for healing, share your recommendations, please.

During Harris' 2014 Elsewhere Residency, he created Scenes from Sonship Past.

During Harris’ 2020 Elsewhere Cross-Sectors: HealthCare Residency, he created Sights of Change.

Stephanie Williams is a tinkerer and doodler, whose work as a multimedia artist navigates autobiographical narratives of identity, memory and misconception; telling story through its pieces rather than its whole. Through self-directed processes of close examination, disassembly and reorientation of sensorial fragments, she curates a context in which our bodies’ amalgamated experience understands the world around us. Williams received her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and has shown both nationally and internationally including Irvine Contemporary, the Arlington Arts Center, Transformer Gallery, and Lawrence University’s Wriston Art Center. She was both a Vermont Studio Center and Toby Devan Lewis Fellow and was recently a resident artist at the Wassaic Project. She is also a member the DC Arts Center’s art collective Sparkplug and is Assistant Professor at James Madison University in Virginia.

Jacob Stanley is a sculptor who focuses on temporary site-responsive installations and loves to wear scarves and vests. His work is generated from informed intuition, design thinking and installed in improbable urban locations. His work exists in a state of dynamic stasis, which entreats viewers to question: is the work finished, has it just begun or is it a prank? These projects often subvert the original purpose of an industrial material to foster a dialogue that focuses on engaging a non-art audience.