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BIO
eliza combs (they/she) is a multidisciplinary artist, expressive arts therapist, and somatics facilitator based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. they work in installation, painting, sculpture, and video art, exploring the body as memory, resistance, pattern, rupture, and transmutation. drawing from queer, genderqueer, femme/feminist, and working-class identities, as well as Irish, Cornish, and German ancestral lineages, combs explores what it means to survive, create, and thrive within systems of oppression, trauma and violence.

their practice is inspired by body-psycho-spiritual and earth-cosmos ways of knowing. ritual, movement, and collective reimagining form into artworks that seek to express the beauty and terror of being alive in a body. since graduating from art school in 2002, combs has been involved in street theater, protest and public art and creative collaborations with marginalized and LGBTQ2S+ youth—experiences that continue to shape their principles, ethics and visual language. they have practiced psychotherapy and expressive arts professionally for the past 12 years specializing in historical and intergenerational trauma recovery, expressive arts and body-centered practices.

ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m having so much fun playing, remembering and connecting back to my creative artist self. I have always made art about the body/ about having a body, a femme body, a queer body, an othered body. A body that holds history, wisdom and sensation. My work comes from my experiences, mysterious places I try to listen to and the communities I’ve been part of/ humans/ we’ve lived through terror, beauty, joy, pain, abuse, love, wretchedness, violence, and being dehumanized. My Self as a Witness and a Survivor has shaped how I see, how I feel, and what comes through me.

I make art to play and bleed and scream/experience ecstacy, joy, sacredness/ through images/ connect with the Divine. To connect with the unconscious and dreams/mystery. To let something move through that is bigger and more complex than verbal language. Birth, rebirth, curiosity, eroticism, spirituality, unknown, desire. The places we cross thresholds/ Dancing.

A few years ago I had a dream where a visiting professor told me I needed to paint a lot of owls. And I told him, “I don’t know if you know this or not but owls are taboo in many cultures, owls are seen as an omen of death.”And he said, “You need to paint a lot of owls.” This dream continues to reveal itself to me. I know the work I am supposed to be doing (and always have done) is with the shadow, a lot of the things people don’t want to look at or are terrified to. Sometimes looking at things feels like death/its so painful. Some pieces I did recently like the victim perpetrator, the shadow, sexuality through the body, the things we can’t see or deny, cycles and patterning/ what we/I can’t say. It is all still emerging and beyond words. Even overcoming the idea who am I/ to be able to create/ to have this beauty and power/ Am I enough or too much?/ after giving and working do I have energy or does it even matter?

I’m influenced by the therapeutic processes I study and practice/right now that is especially Family Constellation Work, Initiatic Art Therapy, emergent strategy, and the idea of “the field.” I make from that place/ I am very interested in what is alive and what is wanting to emerge/ what is possible/ what is the next step/ moving energy/ energy getting moving. I’m influenced by a lot of art I am looking at now and there are just so many amazing artists (which is a bit intimidating). I have always been a process oriented person artist/how does it feel/ the product can be interesting and how did I get there/where did I go?/what did I learn? I make art because it connects me to life. It connects me to health. Art is medicine for me and so many of us humans for as long as we have been human. It connects us to our humanity. I believe it is so important in these times we are living in and always has been.

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I am an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, installation, printmaking, video, and participatory art. After many years devoted to supporting other people’s creative expression, I am returning to my own art in a deep way. This return is a process of playing, remembering, taking risks, and giving sustained attention to the images and questions that ask something of me.

My work begins with the body: a femme body, a queer body, an othered body that holds history, wisdom, sensation, and desire. I explore how personal and inherited experiences live within us, and how making can give form to what we sense and cannot yet explain. Grief, sexuality, spirituality, shadow, and pleasure meet in this inquiry. I am interested in transmutation, in what happens as an experience moves through a body, an image, a material, or an encounter with another person.

Dreams, meditation, movement, and intuitive image making guide my process. I follow recurring forms and gestures across materials, allowing their meanings to change through repetition and experimentation. Wings, eyes, serpents, vessels, chairs, and femme figures move between the intimate and the mythic. Saturated color, expressive marks, and tactile surfaces give these images a physical presence. I am learning to stay with them longer, to discover what becomes possible through sustained attention.

My practice brings together my experiences as an artist, my ancestral and class identities, expressive arts therapist, educator, and community facilitator. Almost 30 years of working with people through art have shaped my understanding of witnessing and being witnessed, and of creativity as a way to build relationship with ourselves, one another, and the world. I am now exploring how these parts of my life can meet more fully within my own work.

Art is a way for me to enter mystery, make contact with what is alive, practice liberation and imagine possibilities beyond familiar patterns. I want to create encounters that make room for sorrow, beauty, discomfort, eroticism, and joy, and invite people into their own process of feeling and discovery.

@expressiveartsanctuary

expressiveartsanctuary@gmail.com

Education

Art Academy of Cincinnati Bachelor of Fine Arts BFA
Sculpture & Art History
2002

Southwestern College Master of Arts MA
Counseling & Art Therapy
2014

Employment

Various Nonprofits - 2010 - present

IAIA
Clinical Supervisor/Lead Therapist

Lifelink-SBIRT project
Expressive Arts Therapist

Valencia Shelter Services
Expressive Arts Therapist/Family, Adult & Child Therapist

Casa Q
Program Manager/Expressive Arts Therapist

Esperanza Shelter
Child & Family Advocate/Expressive Arts Therapist

Boys & Girls Club del Norte (Chimayo & Abiquiu)
Interim Executive Director and Program Manager

Volunteer

Indigenous Ways
2018-2020

DykeTV intern
assist Lorna Simpson
see the archive here
https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/244179
2001

RAYS (Radical Arts & Youth in Struggle)
2000-2003

Barbara Wolf
Documentarist - work on and study

Degrees of Shame, Part-Time Faculty: Migrant Workers of the Information Economy, and: A Simple Matter of Justice: Contingent Faculty Organize

2000

Skills

Video
Computer
Project Management

Exhibitions

Light in Mind with Morgan Banard
SFAI
October 2026

Queer Joy
Vital Spaces
June 2026

Vital Spaces
Installation
April 2026

Women & Femme Show
Revolt Gallery
March 2026

Fun-A-Day
Fourteenfifteen Gallery
January 2026

Embody Dance
Installation
2025

Embody Dance
Installation
2025

Staff & Faculty Show
Balzer Gallery
2023

Awards

Vital Spaces Studio Artist
3140 Studios
2026

New York Studio Program Artist
Parsons School of Design
2001

Press

The Kids are All Right
Citybeat
2001

Last Updated 24.10.37

eliza combs

home from the studio record paintings paintings 30 days text dreams & meditations

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