Co-Founder; Board President

Lauren Dana Smith is an artist, writer and art psychotherapist living in Taos, New Mexico. Smith’s research-based, multidisciplinary practice utilizes sculptural, digital, video and sound compositions to process land and body politics through a feminist lens. Smith studied painting and received her B.A. from Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Smith is a faculty member at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where she received her M.P.S. in Creative Arts Therapy and Creativity Development.

Smith’s work has been exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally. Smith has also published and presented widely within the fields of psychotherapy, art therapy, traumatology, pediatrics and palliative medicine. Smith is a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist and a Nationally Registered and Board Certified Art Therapist and Clinical Supervisor (LCAT, LPAT, ATR-BC, ATCS). She owns and operates a private psychotherapy practice based in both New York and New Mexico.

Smith’s work analyzes and deconstructs consciousness, collective experience and existential presence using an arts-based research practice that centers video and sound composition, large-scale sculpture and alt-narrative development.

Board of Directors, Vice Chair

bianca goyette works in layers. She uses overlapping elements and media to erode the distance between the real and the imaginary, working with materials and processes that speak to the strength and fragility of the human condition. She is a multitude of things working in a multitude of media. She was once told that people get confused if you are too many things, but as Nancy Shaver says, “confusion gets a bad rap.” She is a storyteller, a vocalist, a photographer working in still and moving pictures, a writer, a laser etcher, a papermaker, a sculptor, and a designer. Her work focuses on personal experiences that have tendrils in the breadth of society. It is her own racial experience, her own social experience, her own political experience, her own experiences with language, communication, community (or the lack thereof), and a perpetual need to rethink understanding.

bianca has a BFA from Parsons School of Design and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has released three studio albums and six singles, has performed in venues across the U.S., exhibited her work in numerous galleries in numerous cities, and is a creative director and copywriter specializing in the fabrication of digital assets and experiences that shift how we interact with and perceive the world.

Board of Directors, Secretary

Lynette O’Kane is a Taos-based artist with an extensive exhibition history. Her works have been shown both nationally and internationally, including exhibits in New York, Los Angeles, Munich and Frankfurt Germany.

She has obtained numerous commissions, both private and public, including a Percentage for the Arts commission in Kodiak Alaska, a public commission from the Center for the Study of Applied Ethnicity at Colorado State University and most
recently, a commission for the private dining area at the Ritz Hotel in Bachelor
Gulch Avon, Colorado.

Lynette was the sole 2018 Artist in Residence at the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Reserve.

Board of Directors, Treasurer

A multimedia artist primarily working sculpturally in stone, bronze and ceramics; Brian’s practice pursues the human form through expressions of identity while investigating the vitality of belonging. A parallel practice of abstraction is founded upon listening — informed by the musicality of repetition and active responses to the medium. Having apprenticed sculpture in Germany and the US, they furthered their studies at the University of Wisconsin and have exhibited in the US and Europe. A lifelong commitment to collective engagement, they host the Alluvial Project, an artist-run project space and AIR. Brian is represented by Sun & Dust in Santa Fe, NM.

Board Member

Sid Barrett is a retired public health officer who creates art out of acrylic paint and objects found lying around his studio.  Over a period of fifty years, he has transitioned from photorealism to abstract art. Sid is a regular volunteer at art happenings around Taos and a longtime DJ for freeform radio station KNCE-FM. 

Board Member

Montanna Binder is a storyteller based in Taos, New Mexico, who embodies photography to uproot the self and the identity in order to re-shape and re-story how we view worthiness, place, and connection. Self-taught analogue and alternative photographic processes that forgo the camera altogether give breath to voices, both living and not, to emerge. After living with communities around the world while completing their Bachelor of Arts, and continuing their process of research post-graduation, there remains academic and professional experience in documenting stories from rural tribes and communities in places such as Kenya,Thailand, South Africa, and the Outback of Australia. However, their circuit of storytelling is not complete until the documentation of marginal places, cultures, or beliefs is looped back to the ways the stories of others can influence, impact, or challenge our views of ourselves.

Montanna has exhibited locally and internationally, including Taos, NM; Santa Fe, NM; Chelsea, New York, NY; Brooklyn, New York, NY; London, United Kingdom; Nizhniy Tagil, Russia; Tucson, AZ; Bellingham, WA; Sydney, Australia; and Hong Kong. They have been the Gallery Manager of 203 Fine Art in Taos, NM, curating, installing, and designing exhibitions for four years.

Board Member

Lindsey Schreiber is a multi-passionate studio artist, therapist, and mother of two based in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico. Working with acrylic in a vibrant and joyful palette, her paintings move playfully along the spectrum from pure abstraction to narrative, representational work. Her evolving body of work explores the space between the world as it appears and the worlds we can imagine. Her creative process makes room for spacing out, following rabbit holes, and wandering through landscapes both familiar and far from home. This openness invites chance, playfulness, and discovery into the work. Pulling fragments from memories, dreams, and imagination, she weaves visual narratives that invite wonder, curiosity, and delight. Schreiber is a Licensed Professional Clinical Mental Health Counselor (LPCC) in private practice. Both her creative and clinical work are rooted in the same deep curiosity — about the stories people tell, about consciousness and the natural world, and about what it means to be human. Passionately committed to the arts and to the transformative power of creative practice, she joins this board with a deep belief in creativity as essential to human thriving.