Artist As Carer is a project that places artists in contexts of care within community.

Artist as Carer is led by LEISA SHELTON and is inspired by her lived experience as an artist, carer, educator and facilitator within communities of diversity. Working across these various contexts, Leisa identified a gap and an opportunity to bridge that gap by placing artists in contexts of care, where their skills, experience and artistic lens can support community in broad and new ways.

Leisa brings years of experience and a range of diverse skills to Artist as Carer, with a practice that foregrounds collaboration and advocacy for resilient communities of practice. Leisa has worked as a performance artist, teacher, mentor, curator and intercultural facilitator. Recent projects have focused on social and participatory public works that reveal and offer new models for greater agency and visibility for artists and participants, offering diverse experiences of the world and ways to be within it.

Leisa also collaborates with various major arts companies, and is a regular guest artist with Geelong based Back to Back Theatre, creating and holding development workshops with Theatre of Speed and CAMP programs, and is currently collaborating with B2B artists to create on-line workshops for a new, international CAMP program as part of the 2022 Altered States Festival.

Leisa is a current arts Mentor for Arts Access Victoria and in 2021 Mentored 18 diverse artists across culturally diverse schools as part of Victorias ‘Creative Workers in Schools’ residencies.

In 2020, Leisa began work as a Carer for Shae Benfell and through this relationship, identified how translatable the skills of an artist are, in terms of redefining and expanding the role of Carer within various social settings. This led to her current project #SeeME.

As an educator, Leisa has led graduate courses across the VCA / Melbourne University with an interest in cross disciplinary and social practice outcomes. She led the Theatre Making Animateuring course 2008-2013, enabling a generation of genre defining and exceptional theatre makers, writers, social change makers to develop and launch their individual practices. This course then developed into a Graduate course in Community and Cultural Partnerships, also with the VCA which ran until 2017.

In addition Leisa runs independent retreats and intensives entitled Considering Practice, which are an invitation for participants to consider, define and articulate directions for future practice and engagement within their local communities and areas of expertise, including those of care.

More information and documentation of Leisa’s earlier work can be found via Fragment31.