About Me
Press Room & EPK * Official Bio (See Below)
My Work, A taste…
I am a writer of poetry, creative nonfiction, journalism, a visual artist, and a public intellectual actively participating in the cultural discourse with work that has been widely featured. To put it simply, I am a practitioner of entanglement. I connect and engage with a collection of areas. Exploring the connections beyond the categories or boxes we prescribe to places, things, and ourselves excites me the most. Can you limit your life to “one thing”? As humans, do we truly have only a singular purpose? Or are we intermeshed with things, energies, peoples, and places in ways that defy our attempt at confined labels and definitions?
I would not want my work to fit within such a claustrophobic space.
When I create through photography, words, or another vehicle, I explore different ways to connect a concept or inquiry across different modalities.
My voracious appetite and boundless energy for inquiry are at the heart of exploring different points of connection and entanglement across a range of artistic and professional works. In other words, exchanging titles or names with others is not good enough because it does not bring me to the actual heat and depth of what I encounter. I am interested in tasting what is several miles or many years underneath the surface through an exchange that is also the act of discovery. This kind of excavation requires releasing assumptions about what I might encounter.
I also seek to be informed by a process that births work that goes on to have its own life, one that invites another level of inquiry and discovery between the work and any audience experiencing it. I seek to bring myself and others to places based on an excavation that allows a portal into unknown territories in ways that may unseat all of us from what we think we know within or outside of ourselves.
A Glimpse Into She That Is Her…
I have a weakness for all things horror, histories that involve the things that are so strange they seem like fiction, and almost anything within the realm of the supernatural makes my heart go thump. Given some of these quirks, I love maintaining what I call a list of shenanigans, which is my private list of quotes said by friends alongside the funny, the strange and the bizarre events that unzip in our lives. This could best be described as the list of impossible things (to reference my fave, Alice in Wonderland). Anything abandoned has me at hello. I love to laugh as much as I am romanced by the pursuit of critical thinking and inquiry. I also seek to engage more with my bellydancing given that performing in the past has informed so much of how I approach the page and my photography. My musical tastes are as wide and ranging as my favorite pieces of literature and film. If I had to give a synopsis of me in one sentence it would be simply be this: I seek to live with full audacity. There are so many other options beyond playing the hand you are dealt (like just leaving the table or burning your card deck to start over). Also, if you are interested, my name has a backstory that you can listen to here: "25 Ways to Be Named and Nameless.
The Curatorial Practice of Living | Shanta Lee | TEDxHartlandHill
Official Bio...You know, the Standard One
(But Keep Reading Because There's Lots of Good Stuff In There!)
Shanta Lee is an award-winning writer across genres, avisual artist and a public intellectual actively participating in the culturaldiscourse with a professional wingspan that covers the public health, artsadministration, local government, non-profit and other sectors. Shanta Lee’sprofessional highlights include creating and implementing two academic mentoringprograms designed to curve drop out rates in Hartford, CT and PlannedParenthood of Southern New England’s statewide internship program. All programswent on to survive 20+ years after Shanta’s tenure. Her accolades have included the 2024 New England PoetryClub’s Grant for Poetic Achievement,NationalArts Strategies - New England Creative Community Fellowship and the 2024 Abel MeeropolSocial Justice Writing Award, and 2020 recipient of the ArthurWilliams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts. Shanta Lee’s work hasbeen widely featured in a number of anthologies and in publications such as Harper's Magazine, TheMassachusetts Review, ITERANTLiterary Magazine, Palette Poetry, BLAVITY, Prism,Ms. Magazine,and DAME Magazine. Her work has also extendedinto journalism winning a number of New England Newspaper & PressAssociation (NENPA) awards for her contributing work on several investigativejournalism pieces. Shanta created, produced, and reported Vermont Public’s “Seeing...theUnseen and In-Between within Vermont’s Landscape and she is a regularcontributor to Art New England.
As an author, Shanta Lee’s work encompasses full collectionsand chapbooks. GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to SpeakWoman in Woke Tongues (Diode Editions, 2021), winner of the2020 Diode Press full-length book prize and the 2021, honorable mention fromthe Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, and Vermont Book Award winner. Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023), )is a work that Shanta Lee describes as a 2,000+ year-old phone line opened toOvid, as well as an interrogation of the Greek mythos, while creating her ownnew language in this work. Black Metamorphoses has been nameda finalist in the 2021 Hudson Prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Cowles PoetryBook Prize and longlisted for the 2021 Idaho Poetry Prize. Black Metamorphosesalso inspired the concept that won the FY2024 Vermont Art Council’s CreationGrant allowing her to work with artists Alan Blackwell and Damon Honeycutt tocreate elements for an immersive exhibition. Her chapbooks include: This Is How They Teach You How to Want It...The Slaughter: AField Guide for the Hunted & the Hunter, The Dead-Alive, The Live-DeadOnes, The... (Harbor Editions, 2024), and a double volume of twochapbooks in one, Close Is... and HopscotchBetween the Living and the Dead (Diode Editions, 2024). As avisual artist, Shanta Lee’s multimedia exhibitions have included, Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine –a work that includes her short film, interviews, and photography, and itemsfrom the museum's permanent collection – has previously been on view at theBennington Museum, the Fleming Museum of Art, and the Southern Vermont ArtsCenter.
Within the humanities, Shanta Lee’s work has includedserving as the 2020 gubernatorial appointee to the Vermont HumanitiesCouncil’s board of directors and as a member of the Vermont and NewHampshire Humanities Council Speakers Bureaus. As a speakers bureau scholar,Shanta Lee constructed and delivered the lectures, “Lucy Terry Prince [the first known African American poet inthe US]: Witness, Voice and Poetics within American Tradition,” and “Dazed,Seduced and Transfixed: The Monster Through Time, In Literature and In OurLives.” She served on the advisory for Jay Craven’s film, Lost Nation whichprominently features the life of Lucy Terry Prince in addition to designing,leading, and narrating aproject that resulted in audiosegments for parts of the Vermont African American Heritage Trail that a span across the state of Vermont.
Connected to Shanta Lee’s creative and professional practice is her collaborative work. This includes a special partnership sheformed with Epsilon Spires to co-create the organization’s first officialmultidisciplinary artist salon titled "Transcendence,”that was extended to include regional, national and international artists. When Shanta isn't exploring abandoned places, watching odd films, or doing one of her many creative projects, she teaches poetry at Wilkes University and communications writing at Colby-Sawyer College.
ShantaLee has an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry at the Vermont College ofFine Arts, an MBA from the University of Hartford and an undergraduate degreein Women, Gender and Sexuality from Trinity College. To learn more about herwork, visit: Shantalee.com.
Other Professional Highlights:
*Co-creating and co-curating the I AM… exhibition with the Vermont Arts Council;
*Co-writing Vermont's CreateVT, a statewide strategic plan geared towards the creative sector;
*Spearheading and leading the implementation of the city-wide Visioning a Healthier New Haven , a campaign in New Haven, CT which included a digital storytelling component and data collection;
*The planning and implementing of small -large scale events across Connecticut incorporating the Giving Women Power Over AIDS traveling exhibition;
* Launching a creativity forums series, Healing with Art and Nourishing the Inner Artist: Conversations about Art, Creativity, and Imagination which targeted creatives across the states of CT, MA, and VT.
Other Ways to Learn About Shanta Lee
PBS American Portrait: A National Storytelling Project PBS
Tube Socks & Secrecy (Destigmatizing our bodies with storytelling)
A collaboration between Myovant Sciences and HealthyWomen
Suzanne Kingsbury. “Becoming the Cartographer of Her Own Life” Ms.Magazine
Stories to be told in 'Voices’:What does it mean to be an authentic self? Manchester Journal
Art in the Time of COVID: Shanta Lee Vermont Arts Council
Photography Show In Brattleboro Celebrates 'Perfect Imperfections' Vermont Public with Mary Engisch
Collaborations & Leadership
I Am...(2022 and 2021) in partnership with the Vermont Arts Council
Art Review: 'I AM…' Seven Days
Peoples, Places and the History of Words (Brattleboro Words Project) Vermont Public
DiverseArt from a Diverse Place ARTstravaganza Showcases the Work of
Windham County's Eclecticand Creative Art Scene The Commons
ARTstravaganzaOffers Potpourri of Creativity Rutland Herald
From Ghetto to Granola: A Talk About Racism Vermont Public Radio with Jane Lindholm and Ric Cengeri