I am a storyteller and multi-disciplinary artist. I create ritual, theatrical and interactive art experiences, following an inspiration trail sparked by wonder, whimsy and where diverse crossroads may lead me. I am curious about our lived landscapes and the secrets they hold in their roots, and listen for what they may reveal. The trail keeps unfolding into new zones, as well as revisiting previous ones from different angles.
My past includes being the artistic director of Status Hat Productions, a collaborative that, from 2004-2012, brought together artists, writers and musicians to co-create works together. We also published a monthly artszine, and hosted an internship program that helped over 30 students gain working arts experience and academic credits.
I was co-hosted by The Tatarstan State Puppet Theater and Tatarstan Composer’s Union, in Kazan, Tatarstan (Russia, 2005), for an arts residency that gave me the honor of working alongside other artists in their studios, as well as with student groups of all ages. I was invited back to that region to participate in “The Volga is Our Home” project (2007), which took a team of international artists on a 10 day journey between Kazan and Astrakhan along that waterway, to develop works specifically from the voyage.
My landscape installations include “Games of Sticks and Stones…” (Seattle 2004) a game room you played your way through, and “Wheelhouse” (Troy, NY 2007), an interactive labyrinth. My theatre pieces include “A Rat’s Chance” (2020) and “Rock On, Genghis Khan” (2006-8), along with vignettes for toy puppet theaters. I have a range of other literary and multi-media works in my catalog and archives, which experiment in style, form and possibilities, and include 20 line prose pieces that I use to open studio time, and to develop works and ideas – over 800 of those studies written between 2014 and 2026 (a practice I still maintain regularly).
Further back, my mail-art zine Synthetica (1980s-90s) first appeared in the pre-internet era, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, while I was exchanging works with artists still behind what was known as the iron curtain at that time. Synthetica initially blossomed out of my sense that there would be a growing control of creative thought and expression as an outcome of the technological tools that were becoming increasingly available in those decades: that we would imagine the tools helped us give form to our ideas and perceptions – expedited them — while we somewhat mindlessly used cookie-cutter resources in very repetitious and often stilted ways; that we were slowly, or quickly, loosing all the possibilities and wonder offered by the sweat equity of building our own forms, ways, methods, explorations, experiements. I hadn’t even imagined the echo chambers of social media and the corporate soul-lessness of AI… but used old school cut and paste, found typewriters and such, to honor that trepedition I felt oncoming, with Synthetica my vehicle for creativity in the raw, and to let the muse know, I was listening. Synthetica opened many doors for me, and set me firmly on the path of creating what no one asked me to create, by going where the mystery called. Much of what I have since done, experienced or accomplished owes lineage to Synthetica.
Flash forward again: I began studying with the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies in 2015, and then from 2017-2025, I was privileged to moderate lecture and professional development courses for the Centre, in depth psychology, clinical practice and the arts — working with an international faculty, creating course learning materials and resources, and facilitating student groups. My work in depth psychology sprang from my life-long interest in the creative process, and the potential for transformation it holds. In 2025, I retired from active duty in that sphere, to concentrate on my daily arts practice and Magic Temple Arts.
I currently live in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains – mountains so old, they aren’t very tall anymore. At this crossroads location, my husband and I tend an art and nature sanctuary (this Magic Temple) that we maintain as a dedicated wildspace, to honor the creative pulse of the natural world at its core, and let that pulse guide our daily travels on this funny little planet we call home.
~ Carli Castellani, at Feb. 2026
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