Shelley Etkin is a transdisciplinary artist, educator and gardener based in Berlin since 2012, with roots in the US/Turtle Island and Israel/Palestine. Her artistic research combines dance and performance with ecology through pedagogy, community organising, curation, and place-based knowledges particularly in connection with the plant world and herbal medicines. She works independently and collaboratively, in various contexts, with embodiment practices and relationships to land/place. Her long-term collaborators include Jared Gradinger, Angela Schubot, Aune Kallinen, and Laura Burns, among others. Shelley stewards and facilitates the Garden as Studio platform at Ponderosa – a rural artist residency in Brandenburg, Germany. She was a recipient of the 2020–2021 Tanzpraxis/Dance Practice Stipend from the Berlin Senate for Culture and co-initiated the Social-Body Apothecary/Sozialkörper Apotheke project with Siegmar Zacharias and Kitti Zsiga, designing dwellings to connect with bodily and social systems through medicinal plant allyship. Shelley has been a guest lecturer at the International Campus of Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of the Arts Helsinki. She holds an M.A. in Ecology and Contemporary Performance (Finland), a B.A. in Gender Studies (USA), a Permaculture Design Certificate from Earth Activist Training (USA), and is a student of homeopathy.
16.04.2023
