PAST STAFF
2019-2021
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.
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).
2015-2018
Kerri Mubaarak (Board Director / Executive Committee / Board Secretary)
If you encounter Kerri Mubaarak, it won’t take you long to figure out that her perspective is different. The way she approaches a subject—any subject— whether it’s an artist’s proposed work that she evaluates or a socio-political paradigm addressed in her performances is different. In fact, it’s difference that underlies all her works of theatrical art.
Kerri chose theater as a medium to express what she sees and senses interacting with “people in the periphery” a term she uses to describe those who are often marginalized by race, gender, religion or cultural norms. “The gift of this medium,” she says “is that the raw emotion of human experience can be shared openly and in the safety of an audience.” She considers the craft a practice of both art and healing that pre-dates modern theater.
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.
Documentary Curator (2014-2015)
Mitch works on visuals, audio, food and land with his cat Mica.
Patrick McDonnell | Education Curator and South Elm Projects Coordinator (2015)
Patrick McDonnell has worked in government, nonprofit, and start-ups and has a breadth of understanding about how to navigate the different sectors of city building. He holds a Master’s degree in Urban Planning and Master’s in Higher Education from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Elsewhere he worked at Dallas City Hall as an Urban Designer for a year, and freelanced for two years consulting on creative placing making projects and youth education programs with nonprofits in the Dallas area. In 2012, Patrick was named to the Next City Vanguard class as one of 40 under 40 urban leaders in the county. He serves on the Association for Community Design board (2012-present), including a term as President from 2013-2014. As South Elm Projects Coordinator, he works closely with Elsewhere’s curators to launch and oversee the call for South Elm artist portfolios, articulate public place-making practices as well as expand relationships with local community stakeholders, businesses and partners.
Program & Productions Curator 2013-2015
Jennie was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and came to North Carolina by way of New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Her writing and curatorial work focus on the relationship between art and cultural politics in the 21st Century. She aims to lend ideas a social form by bringing people together to participate in conversations that shape social conditions and the physical and psychological spaces where ideas are shared.
Jennie oversees Elsewhere’s residency programs and directs artistic processes and project production at the museum. Additionally, she acts as a liaison between artists and communities and coordinates the production of public programs at the museum. She is a curator and art historian focusing on situation driven aesthetics and radical ampersanding. Jennie received a BA in Anthropology and Biology from Mount Holyoke College in 1999 and completed PhD course work in Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011. Her curatorial projects have included contributions to “More Love: Art, Politics and Sharing,” “Counter Lives: Portraiture in Contemporary Art” and “John Wesley’s Boeing in Context” at the Ackland Art Museum.
Favorite Elsewhere collection: The Chicken Nuggets.
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).
Chris Kennedy is a teaching artist and curator living in Greensboro, NC. He makes place-based projects that experiment with social learning, queer identity, and civic play. His process is research-based and collaborative. He is currently working through education and the rise of academic capitalism by playing inside a living museum Elsewhere, and pursuing a PhD at the University of North Carolina. At Elsewhere Kennedy directs CoLab a youth-led platform for media experiments and digital storytelling that speaks to peers. His previous projects include an intergenerational free school in an abandoned park in North Brooklyn (School of the Future), a movement research platform exploring fungi as metaphor for connectivity (StrataSpore), and an ongoing investigation into queer identity (Queer Explorer's Club).
Valerie Wiseman
Communications Curator (2012-2015)
Valerie is an artist and administrator interested in the intersection of public programs and creative fields. She also worked with the North Carolina Entrepreneurship Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and holds a BA in Communications & Media and focus in Arts Administration from Goucher College in Baltimore, MD.
Valerie also worked as Operations Curator from 2011-2012 and as a Documentarian Intern and Assistant to the Directors from 2010-2011.
August 28 - September 30, 2010
Resident
blog | cyrus smith dot vox dot com
Portland, OR
An artist and producer in numerous collectives and collaborations, Smith was a cofounder of the Pancake Clubhouse Historic Township and Activity Destination for the Living Arts (welcomes you), an alternative arts space in Portland, Oregon where he coordinated an active exhibition schedule and residency program from 2008-2009. Recent independent projects include The Christmas Time Radio Hour, a weekly program on KPSU dedicated to Christmas and Holiday Music, “Art Talk AM on the Radio,” a weekly interview show which focused on local, national and international artists and curators, and Neighborhood Projects Media, which was featured as part of a collaborative project for the 2008 Time Based Arts Festival, sponsored by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Smith is a recent graduate of Portland State University, where he received an MFA in Art and Social Practice.
2014-2015
Building Curator
Cyrus is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in sculpture, interactive art, radio, publication, and performance. He was part of the first graduating class at Portland State University to receive an MFA with a concentration in “Social Practice,” a form of art that encourages interactivity, communication, and social engagement. Cyrus also worked on the exhibitions team for the Portland Art Museum and Tacoma Art Museum as an exhibit installer and designer. When he is not making art, you may find him playing music, taking the long way home, or sleeping under the stars.
Ian Gamble is a multimedia artist with strong ties to artists, farmers, and old time musicians in Rockingham County, NC. He hosts visiting artists and facilitates their work for the rural outreach project at Reckon Holler, a creative site and art project within his family home in Rockingham. Gamble curated the 2018 Rural Residency, facilitated on-the-ground work, and was a lead artist of Elsewhere Goes To Madison-- an off-site Elsewhere Elsewhere project in partnership with Reckon Holler.As a maker, Gamble toggles between carpenter, potter, sculptor, and tailor. Gamble was also an Elsewhere Curator in 2007 & 2008. While at Elsewhere in 2007, he produced The Skyscraper.
Jay Gamble is a longtime Elsewherian and outsider artist who enjoys speculating on agriculture and architecture while tubing down the Dan River. Working situation and site-specifically, participation and collaboration are integral to Gamble’s practice.
In addition to being a staff curator in 2005, 2007, and 2008, Gamble was a production and studio assistant for the Rural Residency: Elsewhere Goes To Madison— an off-site Elsewhere Elsewhere project in partnership with Reckon Holler.
George Scheer (Co-founder / Board Director) is Co-founder and former Executive Director of Elsewhere. George is a writer, scholar, and artist who fosters creative communities at the intersection of aesthetics and social change. George is also the grandson of Elsewhere proprietress and puzzle maker Sylvia Gray, whose stuff he has been moving around for years! George holds an MA in Critical Theory and Visual Culture from Duke University and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Political Communications.
2011-2014
Documentary Curator (2014-2015)
Mitch works on visuals, audio, food and land with his cat Mica.
Program & Productions Curator 2013-2015
Jennie was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and came to North Carolina by way of New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Her writing and curatorial work focus on the relationship between art and cultural politics in the 21st Century. She aims to lend ideas a social form by bringing people together to participate in conversations that shape social conditions and the physical and psychological spaces where ideas are shared.
Jennie oversees Elsewhere’s residency programs and directs artistic processes and project production at the museum. Additionally, she acts as a liaison between artists and communities and coordinates the production of public programs at the museum. She is a curator and art historian focusing on situation driven aesthetics and radical ampersanding. Jennie received a BA in Anthropology and Biology from Mount Holyoke College in 1999 and completed PhD course work in Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011. Her curatorial projects have included contributions to “More Love: Art, Politics and Sharing,” “Counter Lives: Portraiture in Contemporary Art” and “John Wesley’s Boeing in Context” at the Ackland Art Museum.
Favorite Elsewhere collection: The Chicken Nuggets.
Operations Curator 2012-2014
Erica is a young social researcher and lifehacker from the Bayou State and a graduate of Centenary College of Louisiana with a BA in Political Science and a BA in Psychology. Her work spans medium divides, bringing her social skills to musicians, filmmakers, public artists and photographers alike. Continuing her studies from the road, she followed the migratory patterns of transient communities to Elsewhere.
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).
Chris Kennedy is a teaching artist and curator living in Greensboro, NC. He makes place-based projects that experiment with social learning, queer identity, and civic play. His process is research-based and collaborative. He is currently working through education and the rise of academic capitalism by playing inside a living museum Elsewhere, and pursuing a PhD at the University of North Carolina. At Elsewhere Kennedy directs CoLab a youth-led platform for media experiments and digital storytelling that speaks to peers. His previous projects include an intergenerational free school in an abandoned park in North Brooklyn (School of the Future), a movement research platform exploring fungi as metaphor for connectivity (StrataSpore), and an ongoing investigation into queer identity (Queer Explorer's Club).
Production Curator, 2012
Resident, August 5-31, 2010
Aislinn Pentecost-Farren is an artist, curator, and historian exploring historical and experimental museum design. At Elsewhere, Aislinn supported artists from selection to completion—guiding a site-specific residency process that links artists, objects, collections, and communities through works, events, and public actions. She has worked as Curatorial Design Assistant at the National Museum of American Jewish History, Curatorial Fellow at the Slought Foundation, and Research Fellow at SoundField, all in Philadelphia. She has worked and with for artists Mark Dion, J. Morgan Puett, and Gene Coleman.
She has a background in postal correspondence, documentary, cartography and alternative education. She received a BA in anthropology from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2006, and has worked with the Chicago History Museum, the Raleigh City Museum, Cabinet Magazine. Her work borrows from artistic practice to develop museum exhibits that exploit the vulnerable area between intuitive experience and intellectual consumption to offer visitors an interaction with the polyphonic nature of reality.
Valerie Wiseman
Communications Curator (2012-2015)
Valerie is an artist and administrator interested in the intersection of public programs and creative fields. She also worked with the North Carolina Entrepreneurship Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and holds a BA in Communications & Media and focus in Arts Administration from Goucher College in Baltimore, MD.
Valerie also worked as Operations Curator from 2011-2012 and as a Documentarian Intern and Assistant to the Directors from 2010-2011.
August 28 - September 30, 2010
Resident
blog | cyrus smith dot vox dot com
Portland, OR
An artist and producer in numerous collectives and collaborations, Smith was a cofounder of the Pancake Clubhouse Historic Township and Activity Destination for the Living Arts (welcomes you), an alternative arts space in Portland, Oregon where he coordinated an active exhibition schedule and residency program from 2008-2009. Recent independent projects include The Christmas Time Radio Hour, a weekly program on KPSU dedicated to Christmas and Holiday Music, “Art Talk AM on the Radio,” a weekly interview show which focused on local, national and international artists and curators, and Neighborhood Projects Media, which was featured as part of a collaborative project for the 2008 Time Based Arts Festival, sponsored by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Smith is a recent graduate of Portland State University, where he received an MFA in Art and Social Practice.
2014-2015
Building Curator
Cyrus is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in sculpture, interactive art, radio, publication, and performance. He was part of the first graduating class at Portland State University to receive an MFA with a concentration in “Social Practice,” a form of art that encourages interactivity, communication, and social engagement. Cyrus also worked on the exhibitions team for the Portland Art Museum and Tacoma Art Museum as an exhibit installer and designer. When he is not making art, you may find him playing music, taking the long way home, or sleeping under the stars.
George Scheer (Co-founder / Board Director) is Co-founder and former Executive Director of Elsewhere. George is a writer, scholar, and artist who fosters creative communities at the intersection of aesthetics and social change. George is also the grandson of Elsewhere proprietress and puzzle maker Sylvia Gray, whose stuff he has been moving around for years! George holds an MA in Critical Theory and Visual Culture from Duke University and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Political Communications.
2007-2010
Ian Gamble is a multimedia artist with strong ties to artists, farmers, and old time musicians in Rockingham County, NC. He hosts visiting artists and facilitates their work for the rural outreach project at Reckon Holler, a creative site and art project within his family home in Rockingham. Gamble curated the 2018 Rural Residency, facilitated on-the-ground work, and was a lead artist of Elsewhere Goes To Madison-- an off-site Elsewhere Elsewhere project in partnership with Reckon Holler.As a maker, Gamble toggles between carpenter, potter, sculptor, and tailor. Gamble was also an Elsewhere Curator in 2007 & 2008. While at Elsewhere in 2007, he produced The Skyscraper.
Palouse, Washington
June 7, 2007 – July 10, 2007 as a resident
June 5, 2008 – July 24, 2008 as a producer
Molly Goldberg and Mary Rothlisberger met elsewhere. Somewhere between the this and the that, the here and the there, the dear and the from, they built a landscape of friendship– a series of sites for shared belonging. Through the construction of temporary, moveable dwellings and gathering spaces, through storytelling amd music making, they explore questions of community, interdependence, migration, home and inbetweenness. Their collaborations merge in the passions of a dedicated community organizer and an inspiring teacher and friend-maker: making homes and crossing lines, dotting eyes, singing for supper, and setting a place at the table for every good idea. Together they made a project called Elsewhere Book Project, which is undocumented.
George Scheer (Co-founder / Board Director) is Co-founder and former Executive Director of Elsewhere. George is a writer, scholar, and artist who fosters creative communities at the intersection of aesthetics and social change. George is also the grandson of Elsewhere proprietress and puzzle maker Sylvia Gray, whose stuff he has been moving around for years! George holds an MA in Critical Theory and Visual Culture from Duke University and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Political Communications.
Stephanie Sherman (Co-founder / Board Director / Program Committee Co-Chair) is a designer, director, and collaborative conspirator based in London, UK. She founded Elsewhere with George in 2003 and co-directed it with him for 10+ years. She since founded Common Field, Radioee.net, and Supervisions, a social design studio.
2003-2006
Jay Gamble is a longtime Elsewherian and outsider artist who enjoys speculating on agriculture and architecture while tubing down the Dan River. Working situation and site-specifically, participation and collaboration are integral to Gamble’s practice.
In addition to being a staff curator in 2005, 2007, and 2008, Gamble was a production and studio assistant for the Rural Residency: Elsewhere Goes To Madison— an off-site Elsewhere Elsewhere project in partnership with Reckon Holler.
George Scheer (Co-founder / Board Director) is Co-founder and former Executive Director of Elsewhere. George is a writer, scholar, and artist who fosters creative communities at the intersection of aesthetics and social change. George is also the grandson of Elsewhere proprietress and puzzle maker Sylvia Gray, whose stuff he has been moving around for years! George holds an MA in Critical Theory and Visual Culture from Duke University and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Political Communications.
Stephanie Sherman (Co-founder / Board Director / Program Committee Co-Chair) is a designer, director, and collaborative conspirator based in London, UK. She founded Elsewhere with George in 2003 and co-directed it with him for 10+ years. She since founded Common Field, Radioee.net, and Supervisions, a social design studio.
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.