Alexandra Joye Warren is a native of the Washington, D.C. Metro area. She received her BA degree in Drama with a concentration in Dance/Pre-Medicine from Spelman College and her received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance Performance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Alexandra performed, choreographed, and taught in New York performing with Christal Brown's INSPIRIT, a dance company. Alexandra has been fortunate to work on projects with Urban Bush Women, Bill T. Jones in FELA!, Paloma and Patricia McGregor’s Angela’s Pulse, Maxine Montilus, Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, Maverick Dance Experience, and Van Dyke Dance Group. Now based in Greensboro, NC, JOYEMOVEMENT, was launched in 2014. Alexandra is married to Hashim Warren and mother to Madison and Moses. Alexandra is an Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at Elon University.

Sophie Sanders’ paintings, prints, and fiber works use gesture and iconic imagery to convey the inner potency and tenacity of her subjects. In recent works, she visualizes a space of feminist sanctuary, where individuals can find a sense of restoration and rejuvenation. Other works explore interconnectivity through the visual metaphor of a mandala, the human eye, and brain.

Charis Fleshner is a mixed media visual artist who calls Colorado home, along with Goober cat, the best and worst studio assistant ever. Charis was accepted into University of New Mexico's MFA program under painting and drawing but rebelled against categorization and fell in love with soft sculpture there instead. She is inspired by the middle schoolers she currently teaches art and fiber arts to, color, play, fabric, and intersectional feminism.

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.

Cara Hagan is a mover, maker, writer, curator, champion of just communities, and a dreamer. She believes in the power of art to upend the laws of time and physics. In her work, no object or outcome is sacred; but the ritual to get there is.

Kelsey Sharpe is a queer multidisciplinary conceptual artist and filmmaker of color from Jersey City, NJ of Jamaican-Indian and Irish-Slavic descent. Sharpe graduated from Oberlin College in Oberlin, OH in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in Cinema Studies and Anthropology. Sharpe’s practice examines the intersections between the digital and physical world and the ways in which those spaces alter human connection.

IG: @sharpekelsey

Website: kelseysharpe.com

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.

Christian Lee is a Puerto Rican comic who draws comics, poetry, and books. Their illustrative work varies from subcultures, to horror, to speculative fiction. Under the skin, the heart of their art and uses fiction as metaphor to explore real human relationships.

As a performer, their drawings accompany them to the stage in mixed-media performances using humor and storytelling to digest their experiences as a Hispanic POC, gender expectations, and grief.

Rae Red (they/them) encourages the radical act of laughter in the face of darkness by translating everyday realities into performance and play. Their work exposes the magic and wonder within our daily functions, from the wizardry of sight and color theory, to the way water invisibly keeps our lives flowing smoothly like a ghost within the walls. They explore subjects that are universal like blood pumping through veins, while bringing light our own mortality and to the death that is continuously occurring around us. Through performances across the United States Rae Red investigates topics that unite viewers by exposing commonalities while examining the disparate facets within them. They have presented their work in every type of space imaginable from dive bars and the backs of donut shops to The Museum of Human Achievement, High Concept Labs, Cucalorus Stage Festival, and The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. They received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Towson University’s Theatre Arts Program.

Shelter Elsewhere Fellow

Kinari Council (he/they) is a Community based mixed media artist, designer located in North Carolina.

He attended NCA&T’S VISART Program and utilizes the skills he learned to create socially conscious art centered around creating awareness and engaging subjects concerning marginalized groups. His passion is to use my creativity to speak to and for those that often go overlooked.

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.

Nicole Asselin is a textile artist and educator based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her work explores the intersection of craft, technology and the natural world. Asselin’s practice is narrative, telling the story of an object or material and its potential, both real and imagined. Her work utilizes magnification, abstraction, hyper-local material, and a hybrid digital/analog approach to making. She addresses and challenges themes of locality, tradition, innovation, handcraft, and sustainability.

Zach Whitworth (b. 1996) is a scholar, art worker, and educator from southern Oregon, USA. He studies ecology, networks, information, and some other things. He likes books, conversations, long walks, and skipping rocks.

Cheryl Cullom Stewart (Board Director / Development Committee Chair) has worked in public art administration since 1984. She has placed and promoted public art in central NC as the Public Art Consultant with the Raleigh-Durham International Airport for the renovation of Terminals 1 and 2, the Cemala Foundation, Action Greensboro and currently the Piedmont Triad International Airport and the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro‘s Public Art Endowment. She has managed many public art projects in her career working at Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Art for Transit in New York as the manager of the Permanent Art Program for the NYTA, LIRR and Metro-North Railroad, Program Coordinator for the City of Tampa’s Public Art Program and as a Project Coordinator for Miami-Dade County’s Art in Public Places. She received her Master’s Degree in Art History from Florida State University. She is past-president of the Board of Green Hill Center for NC Art and the Weatherspoon Art Museum Association.

In her practice, Elicia Epstein works across a variety of media, from sculpture and installation, to documentary photography and video, publication and collage. The objects and experiences Elicia creates serve as visual, physical and spiritual interventions. Whimsy and "nonsense" are essential to Elicia’s life and art practice; as a practicing Jewitch, magic and art are her sharpened tools for a more liberated future.

Kylee Jo recently finished her BFA in drawing from the University of Florida, and is still figuring out her identity as an artist. In her multi-media paintings and installations (which sometimes incorporate film and/or sound) she tends to use humorous modes such as cartoons and warped realities to present gendered stereotypes. Materials she uses range from crudely sewn fabrics, to used popcorn bags, horse stickers, and plaster.

Mimi Allin is a visual artist working with performance, photography and video. She uses her body as a visual territory for knowledge production, healing and exploration. Her practice is based in conceptual, performance art, photography and video. The practice’s conceptual intent seeks to activate a critical commentary on gender, power and human relationships. Allin’s work explores contemporary 4th wave feminist themes, encompassing oppressed/oppressor dynamics, the relationship between contemporary discourses about landscape and the self’s internal processes. Allin, while acknowledging death, also seeks paths of regeneration, opening a dialogue between relationship and function, in a proprietary culture that isolates the subject from its production. She reaches and teaches transformation by reclaiming her body and its charged relation to the landscape. The gestures in her work are poetic, ritual-based, seductive, fluid and playful. She falls cathartically in and out of rhythm with the world, aiming to elicit reflection and to disrupt the basic structures of things, real and imagined. 

Anne Wu is an established exhibiting artist working out of northern New Mexico. Curiosity inspires her to explore a variety of media and techniques to create dimensional objects and installations. The last decade has been spent primarily in cutting perfectly good pieces of fabric into very tiny pieces and sewing them back together.

Kyla Gilbert's practice investigates the changeability of matter and the fusion of organic materials and industrial products, in parallel to the human body within its environment. Coming from a background in performance, Kyla is drawn to the intersection between movement, design and building. Her main interest lies in materiality as it relates to domesticity and commodity/consumption. She's interested in the metaphorical and physical weight of the objects we surround ourselves with, and how our lived patterns act on and modify our environments and our bodies. Kyla builds using repurposed and found materials collected from her surroundings in an attempt to explore her connection to place whether it be temporary or for an extended period of time. 

Kyla created Someday My Prince Will Come.