Rachael Layne Rush currently lives in Columbus, Ohio and is working on receiving her MFA from Columbus College of Art and Design. She works primarily in painting, mixed media drawing and printmaking. She received her BFA in Painting with a Minor in Art History from Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work focuses on beauty norms and body image through a societal, metaphysical and personal lens. Her work has shown at Columbus College of Art and Design, The Columbus Metropolitan Library, the Harrison Center for the Arts, Herron School of Art and Design and Stutz Art Gallery.

Andrew Fansler is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His installations and sculptures address our tenuous connection the psychic landscape and the possibility of finding each other there.

Emilio was born in San Pedro de Macorís, República Dominicana. He earned degrees in Fine Arts and Illustration from 2004-2007 at Altos de Chavon, affiliated with Parsons the New School for Design. Afterward he traveled to Puerto Rico to acquire more knowledge and skills from a position as workshop assistant and later workshop sub-manager at GGG furniture, designing, building and installing custom made furniture. In 2008 he began a BFA in Painting at Escuela de Artes Plásticas of San Juan, in San Juan Puerto Rico being acknowledged in 2011 with the Carlos Collazo Scholarship. At that moment he performed as part of the local film industry as art department and costume department assistant, art teacher, as well as a adjunct professor at Turabo International School of Design and Architecture on Gurabo, PR. Emilio was also a project developer, receiving his BFA May of the same year and actively participating on Puerto Rico art scene. He moved to the United States in 2012, obtaining a Painting MFA at Savannah College of Art and Design. In 2013 he went back to the Dominican Republic to participate in the 27 Santo Domingo Visual Arts Biennial while participating in SECAC Members Show in Greensboro, NC and Mixed Mediacy in Savannah, GA . He lives and work in St. Louis, MO.

Zipporah Thompson was born and raised in Charlotte, NC, although now she lives and works in Athens, Georgia. She received her BFA at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, and is currently working towards her MFA at the University of Georgia. She is an avid collector and maker of things. Zipporah primarily works in mixed media sculpture, drawing, and installation. Her work explores various concepts & ideas, including death, ritual, nature, animism, primitivism and spirituality.  Her practice borrows from other interests including anthropology, archaeology and taxidermy.

Devin Balara is a product of the winding, aggressively pastel suburbs of Tampa, Florida. Her current sculptural works employ the visual language of the domestic along with the remnants and rejects of the home improvement industry. Balara fabricates instances that demonstrate the tedium, drollery and futility involved in the cultivation and perpetual re-creation of the material self within the home. Negotiating the spaces between unique individual taste and symbolic objects and the empty promises made by mass-produced banalities, her works question to what end a domestic identity can be realized. She received a BFA from the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, FL and an MFA in Sculpture from Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, FL, the Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, IN, Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, OH and Gallery 313 in Jersey City, NJ. She is a recent fellow of the Vermont Studio Center and is newly based out of Chicago, IL.

Common Field connects, supports and advocates for the artist-centered field by providing a network for independent arts organizations and organizers.

Elsewhere co-founder, Stephanie Sherman, co-founded Common Field and Elsewhere is a founding member organization.

Alison S.M. Kobayashi is an award winning artist working in video, performance, installation and drawing. She was born in Mississauga, Canada where she received a BA from the University of Toronto. She now lives in Brooklyn where she is the Director of Special Projects at UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art.In her work, Kobayashi performs a variety of characters that are both studiously and playfully rendered. These personas are inspired by Kobayashi’s extensive collection of lost, discarded and donated objects; ranging from answering machine tapes purchased at a secondhand shop to a love letter left on a sidewalk. Through repeated interaction with the objects (listening, transcribing, re-enactment, play) narratives and imagery begin to manifest and inspire performances, videos, installations and drawings. The results are humorous, low-fi artifacts of an artist embodying the lives of others. Kobayashi’s short videos have been exhibited and screened widely in Canada, the United States and overseas. She was a guest artist at the 2008 Flaherty Film Seminar and her body of work was a Spotlight Presentation at Video Out, Jakarta International Film Festival, Indonesia. In 2012, she was commissioned by Les Subsistances in Lyon, France to produce her first live performance, Defense Mechanism. She is currently developing her second live performance. Johanna Linsley is writing on Kobayashi’s work in relation to eavesdropping in the soon to be published Voice(s): Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience (Routledge).

Heidi Neilson is an artist addressing topics such as weather, fake snow, and the cultural landscape of outer space. Her work, often collaborative and publishing-based, has been supported by the Art Matters Foundation, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Center for Book Arts, the College Book Art Association, The Drawing Center, Flux Factory, I-Park, the International Print Center New York, the Islip Art Museum, Kala Art Institute, LMCC, the Lower East Side Printshop, Provisions Library, the Queens Museum of Art, Visual Studies Workshop, and Women’s Studio Workshop. She is a member of the ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative, co-founded SP Weather Station, and her work is included in over 60 museum and university collections. Born in Oregon, Heidi received a BA in biology from Reed College and an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute, and lives and works in New York.

Kathryn Sclavi is a socially-engaged artist and educator who creates unique gathering spaces and events collectively with communities. Her work is about imagining new worlds and ways of being by creating new dimensions of shared experiences. The gathering spaces take the form of participatory projects such as colorful forts, collaborative projects, art parades, ephemeral events, and more using media including fiber, found objects, and costume making.  From building fort structures to organizing artistic events, Sclavi create imaginative spaces designed for people to interact and learn from each other and serves as a collective, process-oriented experience. She is an award-winning teaching artist, community artist, and a featured curriculum writer for a number of organizations, including the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, Fleisher Art Memorial, and Young Audiences of New Jersey/Eastern Pennsylvania and Louisiana. Sclavi was a co-founder of Philadelphia-based art collective Homeskooled Gallery, a 4-year-long nomadic art space creating participatory experiences through interactive art. She holds an M.Ed. in Art Education and a certificate in Community Arts Practices from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She is based in Philadelphia, PA and New Orleans, LA.

Marta King

Operations

Marta King is a creative thinker from Portland Oregon. After graduating from the University of Oregon with a BA in both art history and religious studies, Marta returned to Portland in order to further explore her artistic practice.  She is interested in interactive artwork geared towards strengthening her local community, and is particularly drawn to dance, performance, and celebration as art form.

Nina Cochran

Communications

I’m here to tell you about the visual artist Niina Cochran.  I’m a piece of Niina’s artwork, so I will admit that I’m biased.  Niina started exhibiting her artwork, internationally, in 2005.  She is originally from New Jersey, but no she doesn’t have a Joisey accent.  She received her BFA in Illustration from Parsons the New School for Design in NYC and her MA in Visual Culture from Aalto University- School of Art, Design and Architecture in Finland.  She continues to live in a chosen state of limbo…for now.

Nicole Du Bois

Communications

Nicole Du Bois is currently a communications intern at Elsewhere.  After receiving her BFA degree in photography from UNCG this May, Nicole will be re-launched into the "real world" and is looking forward to creating works of art with a focus in collaboration, conceptual and alternative process photography, and she can't wait!

Nandita Batheja

Production

Nandita’s origins are contested. Some say she made herself up. Others postulate that she crawled out of a book that lay forgotten on her parents’ shelves. Still others believe she emerged from a food baby her father nursed after too much big-apple pizza. Regardless, she was born. She grew up a little then went off to study English Literature at Williams College. When she wasn’t lost in literary space, she was stomping and clapping on her college step team, writing, or wondering. She spent her summers and post-grad years working with arts organizations and teaching in urban America and rural India.

Rod Northcutt is interested in people—how they live, die, love, fight, screw, eat, drink, share, hoard, isolate, commune, work, make, and think. He was trained in art schools (MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA in Painting & Drawing from the University of North Texas) and he has exhibited internationally, although he gave up on making pretty things for rich people long ago. He has lived and worked in Austin, Southern New Mexico, Chicago, Detroit, Rochester, and Southern Ohio, and he began teaching at the university level in 1999 in El Paso. He now creates projects that aim to generate dialogs within communities through creative, making-based practice. He is a professor of sculpture at Miami University, Ohio and he maintains a community studio in rural College Corner, OH, Called MAKETANK Projects with his wife Christina Miller and also is one of two co-directors of MAKETANK, Inc. which administers the Oxford Kinetics Festival. Refusing to work alone, he collaborates with other like-minded artists and collectives, cultural groups, and citizens of small communities to use art, intervention, and dialog to address social challenges.

Shannon Stratton is a founder and Executive Director of threewalls, a Chicago based not-for-profit for the presentation of contemporary art and ideas. Established in 2003, threewalls has grown from a start-up exhibition space to a vital visual arts organization supporting contemporary art through solo exhibitions, residencies, grants, publications, conferences and commissioning programs. With Green Lantern Press she founded and published (via threewalls) PHONEBOOK, a guide to contemporary independant and artist-run projects, now in its third volume, and The Artists Run Chicago Digest, a companion, appraisal and extension to the exhibition of the same name at The Hyde Park Center. Along with Roots & Culture, Document and The Public Media Institute, she co-founded (as threewalls) the MDW Fair in Chicago, a gathering of artists and independent visual arts platforms. She is a co-founder of FIELD: Artist Projects and Spaces, a national alliance of and advocacy group for small-scale visual arts platforms and their producers.

Daniel Dean often instigates collaborative projects that address site-specificity, spatial relationships and our engagement with media and technology. He produces sculpture, video and public art projects that challenge expectations while re-imagining value and exchange systems, personal experience, participation, and our relationship to things.He has exhibited and performed his work at: the Bakken Museum, Minneapolis; the Weisman Museum, Minneapolis; The Soap Factory, Minneapolis; Northern Spark Festival, Minneapolis; The Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC; Nathan Cummings Foundation, NYC; The World Bank, DC; NGBK, Berlin. Dean has an MFA in Experimental and Media Art from the University of Minnesota.

Brendan is an Arctic archaeologist and cultural anthropologist based in Nunavut, Canada. His work focuses on the documentation and reconstruction of traditional technologies through land-based workshops and the recording of community memories. Brendan has a PhD in Anthropology, and his current research investigates the tangled lives of humans and objects through recourse to such items as amulets, material mnemonics and children’s toys. Jude’s artwork is driven by themes of psychology and transformation. Depicting bodies in various states of composition, it examines how our imagination negotiates abstract notions such as growth, change and mortality through metaphorical and experiential avenues. Sculptural bodies, created from papier-mâché and epoxy resin become sites of fusion, in which physical anatomy is merged with allegorical counterparts. These altered bodies are then painted in a subdued oil palette. Their representational nature is reminiscent of museum dioramas, taxidermy and didactic science models, causing them to waiver between fact and a sense of unease and mystery. When exhibited together, the works produce an intertwining narrative of transition and longing.

Athena Kokoronis is a cross-disciplinary performing artist based in NYC whose works are often participatory and mix food and dance, to better understand connections between history, appetite, and movement in society.  Her works are performances and are often collaborative and research-based. Recent performances have been presented in New York City at the Judson Church, Flea Theater, Governor’s Island and elsewhere.

Sophie Holstein is interested in the emotional and spiritual side of how people experience each other. Her work reflects her experiences with and observations of people. The figure is the primary subject in her work and is mostly depicted as a gestural silhouette, painted intuitively and fast.Although her inspirations are derived from reality, my paintings and drawings are not specifically narrative. The invention of a stage helps her to place the characters in a context that blurs recognition. The fragmented reality then, becomes a place that offers a new perspective on familiar effects caused by interaction between people.By creating paintings and drawings fraught with psychological content, she explores and filters the impact of my surroundings. Holstein's goal is to translate figures into shapes and colors and to discover the essence and magic of crowds.

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.