Elena’s artistic practice blends her passion for the outdoors with her abiding curiosity about how humans have engaged with the world around them over time.

A Colorado native living in the Pacific Northwest, Elena has always been inspired by the sweeping vistas of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain West. Throughout her life, she has spent as much time as possible losing and re-finding herself high in the mountains, deep in the forests, and along every coast. She is intrigued by the dynamic and often contradictory ways we feel when immersed in nature: small, peaceful, ignited, mysterious, beautiful, insignificant, powerful, embodied, afraid, emboldened, alive. This sense of deep connection is the foundation and inspiration for her artistic practice. 

Trained as a historian (she holds a doctorate from Georgetown University), Elena views working with “found paper” to be an exercise in archival curiosity as much as an exploration of color and texture. She obsessively curates papers for each of her pieces from an ever-growing archive of magazines, catalogs, and old calendars that speak to who we are and how our interests continually evolve. An indictment of our collective comfort with staggering quantities of paper waste, this ephemera is rarely meant to last. Reimagining its material afterlife, Elena gives it new form as meticulously layered landscapes and other quiet scenes from nature, carefully treating each finished work with a rigorous UV-protective process to protect it from degradation.

When she's not in her office or studio, she can usually be found adventuring outside or snuggling up to her feline fur-baby, Thistle.