Kaelen Green
"My art and my study of art are intrinsically me and have been for as long as I can remember."
- Alumni of: 2003 College Scholarship Program
- Resides: Santa Fe, NM
- Hometown: Santa Fe, NM
- Age: 28
- Four-year College or University: Mills College
- Academic/Career Pursuits: Arts / Music / Performance, Sustain myself and others through art and spirituality.
- Other Interests: International Relations / NGOs, Outdoor / Mountaineering / Camping, Religion, Visual Arts, Meditation, Travel
Biography
Kaelen Green tells her story: "I was an artist from the time I could hold a brush. When I was ten years old, I experienced a traumatic brain injury when I fell off my bike. The result was complete paralysis on the right side of my body. The doctors told my parents I would never walk or use my arm again. A month later, I took my first steps. I lost the use of my dominant hand, but before I could sit up by myself or speak properly, I was drawing."
She continues: "After six years of therapy, I sent myself to Arts Boarding School for two of the most fabulous and challenging years of my life. The epiphany of explosive creativity and vision that occurred under the wonderful guidance of faculty and fellow students was proof that I could never leave the arts." Kaelen says her accident forced her to "use the other side of my brain, to understand life from a completely different perspective. It was my initiation as an artist and simply as a person."
Kaelen has earned academic honors and the First Year Academic Achievement Award (for highest GPA in the freshman class) while working as a slide library assistant in the college library. Her gallery solo show at Idyllwild Arts Academy was titled "The Fool Diaries"-which she describes as "paintings, drawings, and writings created over two years around a central artist's statement exploring the overlapping archetypes of the Fool and the Shaman."
Kaelen hopes to make a living from her art, attend graduate school, travel the world, and see and experience as much art as she can. She is currently beginning her training to become a practitioner of reconnective therapy, a form of alternative medicine. She is also working on her "life's work"-a constantly evolving project in which she expects to incorporate many media, including film, painting, photography, written word, performance art, and music.
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