About This Artist
About this Artist
Pronouns: she/her
Mikela Thrasher is an artist and educator from Baltimore, Maryland. She attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, graduating with a BFA in Fine Art and MAT in Art Education. She has over a decade of working with K-12 learners in various settings. In addition to her position as a Resident Teaching Artist, she works as an Arts Integration Coach with Arts for Learning, enhancing teachers’ lesson planning to create exemplary arts-integrated lessons.
Artist Statement
Mikela’s art practice is an ever-evolving reflection of the relationship between the self and the natural world. Working primarily with 35mm film, she creates fragments and abstracted visual representations of place. The specific symbolic vocabulary of palm trees, mountains, and plants is referential to paradise. Through sequencing, she re-contextualizes place-based photography, entering the language of dreams, and the worlds in between reality and imagination. In her writing, she continually alludes to the body as place. She invokes the work of applied Buddhist teacher and writer Thich Nhat Hahn to call upon the concept of interconnectedness of the body to the surrounding world.
Testimonials
"We really enjoyed working with Ms. Mikela! She had great classroom management and a calm demeanor that the students really responded well too. I love that she was able to incorporate what our students were studying in science as well as some social emotional components into her lessons. All of the students in my class were engaged throughout the lessons and were proud of the final product they created."
Rosemary Hills Elementary School, 2nd Grade Teacher
"I loved that this program was both creating an end product collaboratively with a specific idea in mind, but allowed and celebrated each class's interpretation and individuality."
Rosemary Hills Elementary School, 2nd Grade Teacher
"This was a fantastic experience for our 2nd graders, and I hope we can have a similar Residency in future years!" -Rosemary Hills Elementary School, 2nd Grade Teacher "The students were so engaged the entire time and they enjoyed painting and interacting every art session. Thank you, Mikela!"
Rosemary Hills Elementary School, 2nd Grade Teacher
