Artist Bio

Based in New York City, multidisciplinary artist, Sha Michele, works in words, jewels and drama. In each medium, she explores her fascinations with the liminal, transcendent, and her quest for freedom. Sha became captivated with the morphic power of language by age thirteen, while studying Latin poetry and went onto Dartmouth College to major in classical Latin poetry.

In the 1990s, as Michele Kelly, she forged an expansive career as an actor in theater, television, and film, working opposite Jamie Foxx, Ryan Reynolds, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and under the direction of Spike Lee. By 2000, Sha delved into a distinctive, west coast underground arts movement. She was a ghost writer for authors, and a poet. Her poems explore the space between humans, yearning, and lift-off. In 2018, Sha had a solo exhibition, Beyond Flesh, Myths in Stones and Bones, in Lisbon, Portugal, where her jewelry-art incorporated archetypal imagery and classical references in wildly diverse compositions of precious stones, horsehair, ivory, gold, and bone.  Sha, an artist of African-American, Native American, and European descent, recontextualized these elements to use jewelry as silent narrative addressing questions of heritage, cultural definitions, the questions of belonging, and the ever-search for home. 

In 2023, Sha  will partner with reknowned sculptor, Kate Raudenbush, for  the premiere exhibition of Incanto, a debut of original works of Raudenbush's sculpture and Sha's poetry in the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, Richmond, Virginia,. Incanto was born our of the profound inquiries between Raudenbush and Sha during the  early days of the pandemic, as the long-time friends searched for light and cohesion, support, uplift and meaning. Incanto  invites visitors into transformational spaces of self-inquiry. Each sculpture of Incanto will emerge out of the garden landscape in dialogue with a poem with the intention of creating a sacred container for healing.