Alisa Sikelianos-Carter is a Black, Queer mixed-media artist from upstate New York. Her practice is grounded in ancestral reverence, intuitive research, and visual theology. She explores themes of shadow work and mythopoetics as well as the emotional and energetic residues of loss through a spiritual and material lens. Her practice engages the unseen, what is felt but not always visible, through a framework shaped by animism, spiritual inheritance, and metaphysical inquiry.
She draws particular influence from Black Witch Thought, as articulated by scholar Marcelitte Failla, whose writing affirms the sacredness of intuitive knowledge, the power of personal cosmology, and the figure of the Black witch as a radical guide, one who redefines how we know what we know.
Working primarily in drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, and installation, Sikelianos-Carter builds layered visual worlds through a slow, devotional process rooted in material experimentation, divine connection, and nonlinear time. The night sky and ocean appear throughout her work as metaphoric and material landscapes: sites of origin, memory, and return.
Sikelianos-Carter has attended residencies at NXTHVN, Vermont Studio Center, The Wassaic Project, Yaddo, the Golden Foundation, Millay Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Fountainhead, and Art Omi, and is a recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. Select exhibitions include the Ford Foundation, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the Tang Teaching Museum, and James Cohan Gallery.
She received her MFA from Rutgers University in 2025 and her BA in Studio Art from SUNY Albany in 2015.