Shan Wallace is an award-winning photographer, artist, and freedom fighter from East Baltimore. Inspired by the service of social change and the social power of art, and harsh realities rooted in racial and economic divides during her upbringing in poverty, SHAN uses the lens to document communities of the African diaspora. Her work conveys and reveals the social, cultural, and political narratives of black life serving as photographic documentation and archive of Blackness. Dedicated to demonstrating and promoting the value of archiving and photography, and increasing Black visibility, SHAN distributes her photographs internationally. Inspired by the legacy of photo albums, this ongoing project is a grassroots and accessible method of storytelling and archiving, articulating and legitimizing Black people’s experience. The goal is to provide subjects with physical copies of images of themselves to build or contribute to their own archive and challenging us to consciously or unconsciously enforce new ways of seeing, thinking, and being a part of the African Diaspora. SHAN has received recognition from the Baltimore Beat for Best Solo Show, Best Photographer from the City Paper, and awarded 2nd Place for Small Outlet Feature of “Losing Conner’s Mind” by Association of Health Care Journalists'. Her work has received widespread support from publications like the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, Essence, and the now-defunct Baltimore City Paper. SHAN has also exhibited work in museums internationally from the Reginald F. Lewis Museum to Mariano Arts Center, in Havana Cuba. More recently, she's working on confronting oppressive politics and histories of Black Americans through collages and installations.

During Wallace’s residency, she created THE BANSHEE UNDE[RAGE].

Hồng-Ân Trương lives and works in North Carolina and New York. Her interdisciplinary projects examine structures of time, memory, and the production of knowledge by engaging with archival materials, individual and collective narratives, and histories that span cultural and national borders.Her work has been shown at the International Center for Photography, Art in General, Smack Mellon, and The Kitchen among others. In 2013 she was recipient of an Art Matters Grant, a Franconia Sculpture Park Jerome Fellowship, and a Socrates Sculpture Park EAF. She was an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2015. She was a studio art fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program and is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

She is currently working on To Preserve, Destroy.

Rachel Debuque is currently an Assistant Professor and Foundations Coordinator in the Art department at George Mason University. She has exhibited extensively including, New York, Croatia, and Philadelphia. She was recently awarded to attend the internationally recognized Bemis Center for Contemporary Art’s residency program. Her research spans installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Debuque de-familiarizes space and objects using common decorating design strategies such as pattern, paint, and the arrangement of objects. Her work purposefully plays with two and three-dimensional realms, creating a push/pull in perceptions. Vibrant colors to create directional line patterns that suggest dimensional space and flatten objects with matte paints.

Rachel created Future Holiday during her time at Elsewhere.

Jana Harper is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the themes and tensions between materiality and transcendence, chance encounters and human willfulness, relationships and connectivity, and the natural world and human acts of meaning making. Materially, her work takes many forms: drawing, printmaking, artist’s books, sculpture, photography, installation, social practice, and video. Originally trained as a printmaker, Jana has a broad definition of what constitutes her practice. She divides her time between teaching, research, and creative activity: working both individually and in collaborative settings.

Jana created New Walks in an Old Field during her time here.

Iman Person is a visual artist and sculptor based in the Atlanta area. Her use of natural materials and ritual consciousness, create a hybrid reality between physical space and ethereal realms. Coupled with the concept of authentic nature; she embeds qualities of the feminine, primordial memory and anthropological customs to illustrate lineage and identity within the new, synthetic landscape.In 2010 she received her B.F.A from Georgia State University and has become a fixture both in exhibition spheres and public art arenas. In 2012, she was included in Barbara Archer Gallery’s, “Talent Loves Company”, and named one of the 30 most influential artists in Atlanta. She is a member of the Atlanta based collective, Dashboard Co-Op, is a 2011 Hambidge fellow and is 2013-2014 Walthall fellow.

Iman created All Acts of Pleasure during her time here.

Regina Agu is a visual artist and writer based in Houston, TX. Agu’s work has been included in exhibitions, public readings, and performances at New Museum, labotanica, Diverseworks, Project Row Houses, University Museum at Texas Southern University, Box 13, and Lawndale Arts Center, among other venues. She is a 2012 Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant recipient, and received a 2014 The Idea Fund grant for her collaborative project “Friends of Angela Davis Park” in Houston, TX. Agu is a partner at Alabama Song, a collaboratively-run artist space in Houston, TX, and a co-founder of paratext, an independent small press. Published experimental texts include ON | OFF (onestar press, Paris via Book Machine Houston), Visible Unseen (Nyx, a nocturnal, Goldsmiths, University of London), and Index, With and for: “Black Mo'nin',” by Fred Moten (Book Club Book, Future Plan and Program).

Regina created A Living Index during her time at Elsewhere.

Poncili Creación (Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro) is a Puerto Rican group that generates performance and audio-visual experiences that sprout from their interactive sculptures they call objects. They have focused their body of work in the relationship between objects and reality. Since 2012, they have worked with large-scale objects, installations, and video. Although they are most known for their performances that involve live music, dance and experimental storytelling. Their performance tours have taken them around the United States, Canada, Europe, and The Dominican Republic. Their objects have been exhibited in museums such as the MAPR and the MoCa as well as in independent galleries 787 studios, Art lab, Gr_und, Edge zones, Meta-gallery, Poor Farm Experiment among others.

During Poncili Creación’s 2018 residency, they created Multi-Parade.

Stacy Lynn Waddell creates works that appropriate the power invested in linguistics, historical record and cultural leitmotifs. After earning her MFA from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007, Waddell’s works and multimedia installations have been on view at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University (NC), the Weatherspoon Art Museum (NC), The North Carolina Museum of Art (NC), The Gibbes Museum of Art (SC), The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PA), Project Row Houses (TX), The Studio Museum in Harlem (NY) and Koplin Del Rio (CA) among other venues.

Waddell’s works are represented in public and private collections across the country. She has been awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, an Art Matters Grant and has been in residence at Project Row Houses. Currently, she is participating in When The Stars Begin To Fall: Imagination and the American South that originated at The Studio Museum in Harlem and will travel to the NSU Museum of Art, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. (Fall ’14) and the Institute of Contemporary Art-Boston, MA (Spr ‘15). She resides in Chapel Hill, NC.

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.

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.

Izel Vargas is a South Florida based mixed media artist and educator who hails from the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas (Alamo, TX). Raised in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Vargas cites his upbringing as playing a vital role in his approach to making art. He earned his BFA from the University of Texas Pan American and his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC. As an educator, Vargas has taught art to all age groups and is an currently an instructor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL.

Jillian Mayer steeps her artistic practice in the verisimilitude of a generation that came of age in the 1980s. Mayer calls upon drawing, photography, video, online platforms, installation, and performance to enact scenarios of apathy, dysfunction, and disillusionment. Indoctrinated into expectations of upward mobility, instant gratification, and the succinct finesse of a television sitcom and web experience, Mayer critiques the dissonance between her childhood optimism and the state of contemporary culture with an erudite playfulness. In 2010, her video Scenic Jogging was one of the 25 selections for the Guggenheim’s Youtube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video and was exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany. Recent solo projects include Family Matters at David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2011), Love Trips at World Class Boxing, Miami (2011), Erasey Page at the Bass Museum of Art (2012) and Precipice/PostModem at Locust Projects (Miami) for which the gallery received a Harpo Foundation grant. Her video works have been premiered at galleries and museums internationally and film festivals such as SXSW and Sundance. She was recently featured in Art Papers and in ArtNews discussing identity, Internet and her artistic practices and influences.Mayer is the front woman for #PostModem, a performance collaborative that makes meta-pop music based in art/web theory. Their original songs will be used in a feature length musical film that Mayer is writing, directing and producing in collaboration with Lucas Leyva. The satirical film takes place in the future and tackles digital identity and net neutrality. The film extends to software apps, poetry, installations and Internet experiences.

Nikita Gale is a self-taught conceptual artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a BA in Anthropology (Archaeological Studies) from Yale University and exhibits regularly throughout Atlanta, Georgia and New York City, New York. She was an Artist-in-Residence at The Center for Photography at Woodstock in Woodstock, New York in 2011 and is currently in the Studio Artist Program at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. She currently serves on the board of directors for BurnAway, and Atlanta-based non-profit arts publication.Her work can be found in numerous collections including the Howard Greenberg Gallery collection in New York. Gale has had work featured in ART PAPERS, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Headline News, and Oxford American and has been profiled and reviewed by numerous publications including Frank151 and Artforum. Listen: Interview with WUNC's The State of Things July 16, 2013, Live from Triad Stage

John Q is an idea collective whose name references “John Q. Public.” The “public” is left understood, though the work is considered a kind of public scholarship, and the “Q” is left hanging to reference the group’s interest in queer history and politics. The collective consists of Wesley Chenault, Andy Ditzler, and Joey Orr. John Q has been funded by Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue (New York) and has participated in the 2012 National Queer Arts Festival at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco.

Joey Orr holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an ABD Arts and Sciences Fellow at Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. His dissertation, Practicing the Past: Socially Engaged Remembering in Contemporary Art, looks at cooperative memorial practices at the intersection of memory studies and art history. The study includes a practice component in the context of the collective, John Q, of which he is a founding member. Joey also currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal for Artistic Research (Bern, Switzerland). Past projects have been reviewed by Art Papers, Art in America, ARTnews, Contemporary (UK), Public Art Review and Sculpture magazine, among others.

Wesley Chenault is a certified archivist and head of special collections and archives at Virginia Commonwealth University’s James Branch Cabell Library. His interests in memory, place, and identity take forms as diverse as collection development, exhibitions, public art, teaching, and traditional scholarship. Chenault’s work on Atlanta LGBTQ archives, history, and memory includes the book Gay and Lesbian Atlanta; public artworks, exhibits, and publications with idea collective John Q; and exhibitions at the Atlanta History Center and online through OutHistory.org. He holds a PhD in American studies from the University of New Mexico and a MA in women’s studies from Georgia State University. 

Elsewhere Project | Untitled (Books)

Born and raised in Detroit, Melissa Vandenberg is an artist, educator and curator living in eastern Kentucky. Her recent creative inquires investigate fear, impermance and power with everyday materials like fabric, stickers, temporary tattoos and found objects. Current events, nationalism and ancestry play a fundamental role in her studio practice through imagery of flags, gravestones, life-vests and atomic explosions. Additionally, she is exceptionally fond of mustard and cilantro, not together though.

Elsewhere Project | Sew To Speak

Nick Szuberla multimedia artist and the director of The Prison Poetry Workshop, a national radio series that connects audiences with the genre of prison poetry found within US jails, detention centers and prison. He  works with Appalshop -  a 40 year-old non-profit multi-disciplinary arts and education center in the heart of Appalachia producing original films, video, theater, music and spoken-word recordings, radio, photography, multimedia, and books. Dedicated to the proposition that the world is immeasurably enriched when local cultures garner their resources, including new technologies, to tell their own stories and to listen to the unique stories of others, Appalshop’s education and training programs support communities' efforts to solve their own problems in a just and equitable way.