Indiana born and raised, Emily Ellingsworth has lived all over since high school. She earned her BA in Fine Arts at Flagler College with minors in Creative Writing and Stained Glass. She received her MFA in Non-Figurative Painting and Drawing from Academy of Art University where she focused secondarily on fashion illustration, for a non-classical drawing approach.
Emily also has a passion for plant-based food. She advocates to eliminate food deserts and enjoys empowering youth through gardening and healthy food preparation.
She has worked at many farms, schools, art centers, and organizations including the John C. Campbell Folk School, the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Westminster Canterbury, Art on Wheels, Stuff Redux Creative Reuse Center (now SCRAP RVA), Shalom Farms, Art 180, Performing Statistics Project, and Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden and many others.
Emily loves building community through creative reverie and wild revelry alike. She cares equally about putting art materials into the hands of enthusiastic and reluctant beginners as well as elevating art intellectualism to an elite level with her more experienced students. In classes like Abstract Expressionism this duality thrives. She believes art is in everyone’s guts, we just need to let ourselves channel it, roll with it, risk, and be rewarded.