Shannon Harvey
(Artistic Director)

Shannon Harvey is a co-founder of Messenger Theatre Co. along with Emily Davis and Agathe David-Weill. She was the artistic director for Persephone, creating the masks and puppets. Persephone was produced (by Messenger Theatre Co.) at RedLAB and then remounted for the New York International Fringe Festival in August 2002. She also designed the puppets and masks for the company’s new production, “The Golden Apple: For the Fairest”, performed at the Kraine Theater, May 2003. Additional Messenger Theatre projects include designing a street performance with puppets for the Lysistrata Project, an international act of theatrical dissent against the war in Iraq, and a short Punch and Judy style puppet play titled “The Enemy”. Most recently, she led a series of giant puppet and mask building workshops for Earth Celebrations, a garden preservation arts organization located in the Lower East Side of NYC. One of her puppets is also featured in the a-cappella award winning comedy group Minimum Wage.

Shannon is a mixed media artist whose work has focused on interactive story-based painting, installation, and performance art. She strives to combine elements of ritual and storytelling in her work, as she believes them to be powerful forms of communication. In 1995 she received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY and in 2000 a Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on public art and mythology from California State University at Monterey Bay (CSUMB).

She has completed several mural projects, including one involving women who had been victims of domestic violence. Other mural projects have included designing and implementing a painting installation in the CSUMB music hall; collaborating with local community on a mural depicting sea life for a café; and various private mural commissions. Most recently, she completed two collaborative projects for Groundswell Community Murals. One was a mural with Jewish teens to celebrate the first Jewish Heritage month in Brooklyn. The other was a summer long project in which she worked with a group of teens to design, develop and paint a 63 foot long mural about environmental problems in Sunset Park. As a mask and puppet maker, she has experimented with leather, papier-mâché, carved foam and found materials. Often inspired by characters from mythology, she strives to find the connections between our basic human experiences and these larger then life stories. A collection of her masks was featured in a solo exhibit at the Johnson Gallery in San Luis Obispo, CA and at the Stables Art Gallery in Taos, NM.

In addition to this creative work, she has had ongoing employment teaching visual arts both at a college level and in after school programs. She occupied the position of community liaison for a Lila Wallace grant funded community based arts program out of CSUMB called the Reciprocal University for the Arts Project.