We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Eliot Engelmaier. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Eliot below.

Eliot, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

Earning a full-time living from my creative work is not something I have been able to do, but it is also something that I have actively decided not to prioritize.

For me, the goal of monetizing my work seems counterintuitive to my relationship to it. I sometimes make work slowly, sometimes work rapidly, and sometimes make no work at all. My artistic pursuits are the area of my life that feels most intuitively driven by my emotional and intellectual wants and needs. When I have an idea for a project or words that feel worth writing down, I try to trust my impulses and motivations as purely as possible. Putting financial pressure on this process is something that I feel would diminish the value it brings to my life, and the sincerity of the work I produce.

I work a full-time job within the art world which keeps me connected to the field I have devoted so many years to, and allows me the flexibility to work on independent creative endeavors at my own pace and in my own way. If there comes a day where projects or pieces I’ve worked on provide me with substantial income I will be immensely grateful, but in order for that to happen in a way that feels authentic to me, it can’t be my goal.

Eliot, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a genderqueer visual artist, writer, and curator with southern roots who has called New York home for the better part of the last seven years. My relationship to the arts started in an interesting place – on the tail end of a decade long run as a soccer player.

I was fifteen and had just quit the sport that was the backbone of my identity, my source of community, and the largest consumer of my time. Left a bit aimless, I found myself in a summer photography course that changed the trajectory of my life. In the years that immediately followed I poured myself into the art form and wound up graduating with a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design in 2021.

The work I produce and the way I approach making has changed drastically since I first began, but what has remained the same is the role it plays in my life. It is the place where I can best connect with myself inwardly, and express who I am outwardly.

I make work that is largely rooted in various aspects of the human condition; including but not limited to philosophies of the self, collectivity and interdependency, and the world surrounding us. I at times make work that is theory based and aims to allow myself and its viewers to think, and at times make work that is emotionally based and aims to evoke feeling. I most frequently produce photographic and text based books, videos, poems, and other image-based projects.

My current project, which I have just recently announced, is called AtOnce Publishing. This project will serve as a platform for both my personal and curatorial publications and is something I am greatly looking forward to building.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist for me is the perspective it has granted me.

There are few things I find as deeply beautiful as the act of someone devoting their time and energy to a project solely because they feel it needs to exist in the world. I see it as an act of love and care.

Whether it be through music, dance, writing, performance, or visual art – I am completely enamored with the transformation of passion, curiosity, and desire into something tangible that can be witnessed. The arts, and being an artist, has for me validated the importance of things as personal as acknowledging past hurts, and as social as questioning the ways that technology and social media have affected how we as humans connect to one another. It has altered every aspect of my life.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

If I am to name a particular goal or mission driving my creative journey I would say that it is, above all else, sincerity. It is endlessly important to me, and the thing that I work hardest to maintain in my projects and in my day to day life.

As lofty as it may sound, the question of whether or not something I am doing is sincere has narrowed my focus in ways that I’m not sure anything else could. This filters through every facet of my creative practice and the life that surrounds it – in the relationships I build, in the projects I choose to put time and money into, and in the social spaces I seek to create for myself and other creatives.

So far, I’m quite happy with where it has led me.

Contact Info:

• Website: eliotengelmaier.com
• Instagram: @eliot.engelmaier and @atonce.publishing
• Other: https://vimeo.com/user84945557