Interested in joining our team? Click Here

A Former Resident of Haiti, An Engineer,
A Photographer, A Social Worker, A Sculptor,
A Designer, An Art Teacher, A Motivator,
A Med Student, A Costumer.

 Collectively, Ten Artists.

About Melissa:

THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Having spent the last ten years restlessly roving the planet, Melissa Schilling, a published writer and photographer, has spent time volunteering at an orphanage on the Mayan Riviera, riding bicycles through Patagonia, cooking Basque food in the Pais Vasco and deep-sea fishing off the coast of Cuba. Melissa speaks in sparkles. Her ideas are known to cause tremors of activity, and her movements cause ripples in those around her. Underneath her skin lies the spirit of Beryl Markham and the tongue of an auctioneer. She learned everything she knows from her mother and she’s proud to admit it.

After earning a B.A. in Communications and an M.S. in Soil Science, she launched her cheese and wine consulting entity, Praise Cheeses. She has been providing delight and education for Microsoft, Ebay, Yahoo, Hewlett Packard and Google, as well as teaching cooking classes to special needs children at a small art studio. She also regularly contributes food articles to Edible East Bay Magazine and the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper. When she’s not teaching, roller skating or knee deep in her garden, you can find Melissa Schilling capturing the fluidity of life through her photography site, MelissaSchilling.com

Melissa is our Creative Director and the lead on science based art projects.
Contact Melissa Schilling: melissa@projecthopeart.org
www.melissaschilling.com

About Jenni:

THE SCULPTOR
Jenni Ward is a sculptor, art instructor and owner of Earth Art Studio. In 2005, she opened Earth Art Studio; a sculpture studio offering clay and mixed media sculpture classes and workshops for children, teens and adults. Throughout her teaching career she has worked extensively with many youth and senior art programs. In addition to teaching she has been creating, showing and selling her own sculptures since graduating from University of Hartford-Hartford Art School with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1998. She has exhibited her sculptures locally, nationally and participates in the Santa Cruz County Open Studios.

Jenni, our Founding Artist and Chief Visionary, handles our day to day accounting while balancing the flow of our color theory, drawing and painting workshops.

Contact Jenni Ward:  jenni@projecthopeart.org
www.jenniward.com

About Kathy:

THE ART TEACHER
Kathy came to teaching art by way of volunteering at her son’s kindergarten class in Sherman Oaks, CA. His public school had long since cut out art classes, so only students with parent volunteers were lucky enough to have any art at all. Many hardworking PTA parents came to the rescue, raised enough to pay for a teacher, and Kathy jumped at the chance. Her B.F.A. from the Minneapolis College of Arts & Design and 20 years in graphic design helped her bring a new twist to art projects for both her students, and then later her blog followers at www.artprojectsforkids.org.  She now teaches weekly twenty K-5 classes and also conducts an after-school Art Enrichment program.

Kathy is our resident art project developer and also manages our e-newsletters, Homemade Dress Project and Project Write-Ups.

Contact Kathy Barbro: Kathy@projecthopeart.org
www.artprojectsforkids.org

About Stefanie:

THE DESIGNER
Stefanie Gesiorski lives to make others smile and laugh. Her first foray out of the US and into the world of service was a trip with Habitat for Humanity to dig ditches and distribute clean water to the squatters’ villages near Matamoros, Mexico, where she was promptly reprimanded by the trip leader for singing and clowning around with the locals to make them laugh. So of course Stefanie was thrilled to discover Project HOPE Art, where spreading joy and whimsy is not only tolerated, it’s the main goal of the project!

An accomplished seamstress and clothing/costume designer, Stefanie has produced and participated in multiple fashion performances in San Francisco as a driving force within the Cloud Factory Design Collective. Most of her time is currently spent writing, promoting and producing super fun events and fundraisers in the Bay Area, attempting to recreate delicious foods she has tasted in her travels, hatching and executing creative plans for whimsical adventure, and performing feats of strength in the great outdoors. Her most recent feat was successfully completing the 545-mile bicycle journey from SF to LA to raise awareness and funds for the fight against AIDS with AIDS/LifeCycle.

Stefanie manages the back end of most every project, perfecting outcomes and processes. She is also the instigator of impromptu dance parties that usually include tutus and the soundtrack to Xanadu.

Contact Stefanie Gesiorski: stef@projecthopeart.org

About E:

THE ENGINEER
“Design like you give a damn” is a constant and fundamental philosophy shared by Elizabeth amongst a global community working on designing and building responses to humanitarian crises. Collaboration amongst multiple organizations and bringing varied resources together for such environments to thrive is at the core of how we make it work. Such collaboration spans the universe to converge, yet is hardly limited to, such things as alternative construction, disco, composting toilets, social sculpture .

Elizabeth assembles ideas and transforms them into novel next steps in her assorted design projects. She has stretched into architectural, mechanical, industrial design and engineering realms as they pertain to environmentally and socially responsible fabrication and community building. Elizabeth collaborates with other artists, designers, scientists, engineers, and anyone else interested in the process, instilling the belief that our built environment is more effectively designed and implemented by interdisciplinary teams with the greater whole in mind.

She holds a B.Arch from Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Los Angeles and strives to integrate safe shelter, clean water, sustainable food, and alternative energy systems into cohesive kits that work for places stricken by unexpected natural disaster, and to rebuild infrastructure in a modular way. Elizabeth currently is developing new ways for sustainable, modular construction to happen in Haiti and other countries where limited building materials is a challenge. Foldable desks where kids can draw and paint, vertical gardens that grow nourishing food along with providing a place to play, rainwater catchment system design, and alternative energy systems design with solar or gasifiers (energy from trash) are among some of the things she manages with HOPEArt.

E handles all of our technical drawings and gives a visual voice to most of the HOPE Art ideas and projects.

Contact Elizabeth Marley: e@projecthopeart.org

About Liz

THE SOCIAL WORKER
Elizabeth Ancker has spent the last 5 years working with homeless families as a social worker in San Francisco and has been very active in the homeless community advocating for safe, clean shelters. She also has worked at the Thailand/Burma border doing disaster relief following the 2008 cyclone in Burma, and through her legal background has experience appealing and defending death penalty cases in the deep south. All of her human rights work has stemmed from a love of people and love of the world, so she has also made it a point to be dedicated to laughing, playing, and traveling as much as possible and has been very successful! She also loves all things sparkly, glittery and shiny.

Liz manages our federal and state grant applications and maintains our non-profit status.

Contact Liz Ancker: liz@projecthopeart.org

About Monica:

THE MOTIVATOR
Monica Williams lives by the philosophy that we should all have our C.A.K.E. and it eat it too!
CAKE is an acronym for Compassion Awareness Knowledge Enlightenment and Monica believes that we should strive to eat CAKE each and every day! Possessing a B.S. in Business Administration with an emphasis in Marketing, Monica has worked in market research & consulting, marketing program management, and sales. Most recently she delved into Social Services through her work with the Professional Association of Childhood Education.

Monica is known for motivating friends and family alike. Whether it be eating healthy, exercising, connecting with others or simply going out and having fun, Monica always has something positive say no matter how dire a situation. Her work with HOPE Art follows work for a slew of start-up non-profits including the Pacific Art Collective (now known as Collabo Arts), SHARE (an organization that served as the model for Gavin Newsom’s Care Not Cash homeless initiative), in addition to volunteering for several social work agencies in San Francisco.

Monica manages our grant applications and Art for Haiti chocolate bar program.

Contact Monica Williams: monica@projecthopeart.org

About Sarah:

THE COSTUMER

If she were to be described in one word, it would be vibrant. Sarah Boll was born with a flare for the spectacular and the outrageous. In her early days she fell in love with the stage playing princesses in musicals. Nowadays she translates her creativity into fashion and performance at an array of striking events. Her portfolio includes costume design, catwalk displays and dramatic performances.

She earned her BA in Theater and Art and later studied Patternmaking and Design. Boll has worked in professional costume shops and designed for gift and accessory companies. She is one of the founding members of the San Francisco-based theater company the Primitive Screwheads, where she serves as a costume designer and performer. She is best known for her recurring role as the Sparkle Tossing Unicorn. She performs as a dancer with local bands and enjoys creating absurd spectacles with local variety shows. Dress up is her favorite activity and she believes people should wear costumes as much as possible.

Sarah coordinates Self-Expression and Empowerment Workshops through textile design for HOPE Art and can’t wait to make fabric party hats with all the girls at OJFA.

Contact Sarah Boll: sarah@projecthopeart.org

Our Part-Time Volunteers

About Jacq:

THE MED STUDENT
Jacquelyn Knapp stands for three things: Trust, Love …Inspiration
In order to best weave a web of these actionables, she spends her time wisely and emphatically. She has served in the Peace Corps in Guyana: teaching computer fundamentals in a small rice farming community and working with HIV at-risk youth. She has worked in the corporate snow globe of IT analysis, logging seven years of strategic data mining and software development. Most meaningful to her dream of becoming a doctor, Knapp volunteers at Children’s Hospital Oakland in their school program. She performs bedside rounds to assist children with their homework. Additionally, Knapp uses her technical background at CHORI (Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute) to assist with African American youth diabetes research. Knapp lives in Oakland, Calif overlooking the oldest bird sanctuary in North America. She enjoys fresh farmers market produce, running, and reading Science magazine. Most often it is Knapp’s commitment to trust, love and inspiration that forces her out of her comfort zone and onto new walking paths of life.
Contact Jacquelyn Knapp: jacq@projecthopeart.org

About Julie:

THE FORMER RESIDENT OF HAITI
To get a good idea about who Julie Ulm is, you must know that her core being is a vortex of virtue. She is passionate, creative, and determined. She tells a tale that not many of today’s youth can repeat as their own. A California girl, born and bred she is steeped in the Western United States lore of frontierism and adventure. As a young girl her family first moved to Florida and then to Haiti. It was in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation that she truly learned important aspects of life.
She learned …
Candles are not only for being romantic, but also serve as a great way to do homework.
Play-dough doesn’t just come from the store, but could be made with flour, salt, and water.
When the Peugeot (unreliable hand-me-down car) breaks down a mile or more from school, 2 feet work just as well as 4 wheels.
Since moving back to the US, everyday the sun rises, so does the spirit of the Haitians in Julie. A selflessness that extends far beyond lending a neighbor a cup of sugar. A mind to know that even when things are at their worst here, there is always someone who has it worse somewhere else. It’s time for Julie to be able to give back to the Haitian people what they gave her; a new look on life. At the current exchange rate every US dollar is equal to 8 Haitian dollars. Please help us help them has become Julie’s mantra. And she won’t stop exploring ways to give and help.
Contact Julie Ulm: Julie@projecthopeart.org