Announcing a new FACEing Mental Illness project!

"creAtypical," a collaborative, multi-disciplinary live performance will debut in April

Reposting to correct inadvertent omission of Sarasota Strong as a partner in the “Common Ground” project. My apologies.

Those of you who have followed FACEing Mental Illness since its inception in 2016 as a Carter Center fellowship project by Sarasota journalist Carrie Seidman know that it has had many iterations.

The original project involved weekly newspaper profiles of people in recovery from and living with a variety of mental health conditions, as well as an art show of “self-portraits” created by those individuals to visually share the realities of their challenges. Included within the year-long project were panel discussions, guest speakers and the creation of a documentary film — all aimed at eliminating misconceptions about mental illness and normalizing the mental health challenges we all face.

Subsequently, FMI evolved into this Substack platform, which continued the written stories of those with lived mental health experience. Eventually, it also included audio podcasts with people from across the country living with a mental health condition, who shared their experiences and advice.

Last year, FMI collaborated with Sarasota Strong and the SPAACES Art Gallery in Sarasota to match professional artists with amateur artists with lived mental health experience. Both artists in the “teams” shared with each other the difficulties they have faced maintaining their mental wellbeing and the avenues they discovered to find a greater stability and serenity. Together, they produced a work of art that illuminated their mutual discoveries. The works created for “Common Ground” hung in the SPAACES gallery for several weeks and resulted in several sales for the artists involved.

Now — after a long hibernation in which FMI founder Carrie Seidman was wrapping up her newspaper career — FACEing Mental Illness, is coming back to life with a new project that will expand exposure for neurodivergent artists and continue to dismantle the perception that someone with a mental health condition is in any way limited or impaired.

“creAtypical” is a multi-disciplinary live performance that involves original poetry/spoken word, music, dance/choreography and visual art created by six artists with neurodivergences, ranging from dyslexia to schizoaffective disorder. It is being produced in collaboration with Sarasota Contemporary Dance and underwritten by the Johnson-Singer Arts Education Foundation.

The concept for the project was to take an original poem, written by a neurodivergent poet, and use it as the inspiration for other neurodivergent artists to create a musical score, choreography and visual art. These multi-disciplinary creations are being overlaid, overlapped and integrated, to produce a performance in which all the artists will present their work live and simultaneously.

The artists — Shiloh Hartanowicz (poetry/spoken word); Chris Cournoyer and Keaton Williams (musicians/composers); Paul Mathisen (visual artist) and dancers Leymis Bolaños Wilmott, director of SCD, and Carrie Seidman, founder of FMI — began meeting in December to brainstorm ideas, create a story board and discuss how their work could be integrated. Today, with the poem and the score nearly complete, choreography and artwork has begun and the team is meeting monthly to begin rehearsals of what will become the final integrated presentation.

Let us introduce you to the participants:

Shiloh Hartanowicz (poet): Shiloh has written poetry her whole life. It has helped her process many personal struggles and has given a voice to her thoughts when they were difficult to convey. By day she works for a company that examines, assesses and values collectibles. She utilizes her writing to communicate with coworkers and customers. She feels writing gives the recipient space to read and respond, thereby helping both sides understand each other. Ultimately Shiloh wants to spread positivity and awareness through her work.

Chris Cournoyer (composer, bass player): Chris, who is of Lakota descent, has been involved with music for most of his life, having sung in the choir as a child, played a classical repertoire with the West Coast Symphony Youth Orchestra in high school and performed on electric bass in a rock band with his brother. He graduated from the University of South Florida with a Bachelor’s of Art and a minor in jazz studies.

For several years, Chris’s challenges with bipolar and schizoaffective disorder derailed his musical and academic pursuits. However, in recent years he has completed a violin repair course, earned a master’s degree in teaching (in preparation for teaching K-12 arts curriculum) and has performed with the Bradenton Symphony, the Illyrian Symphony, at Jazz Club library jams and with his duo, (bass/piano) with Keaton Williams, known as The Jazzberries.

Keaton Williams (composer/keyboards): Keaton has been playing the piano since elementary school. He played in the Jazz Band at his high school in New Mexico, and went on to study music performance at the University of New Mexico and the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he declared a major in film scoring.

Though at times Keaton’s mental health challenges have caused him to set aside music temporarily, he has always found sitting down to the piano to be therapeutic. Through a previous FACEing Mental Illness project, he met Chris Cournoyer and, realizing their mutual musical interests, they formed the duo, The Jazzberries, which specializes in performing jazz of the American Songbook at cocktail parties, gallery openings and other events.

By day Keaton, who is blind in his left eye from birth, works as a canine technician at Dogs, Inc. (formerly Southeastern Guide Dogs), where he is involved with dogs in training to become guide dogs for the visually impaired. His other interests include martial arts and ballroom dancing.

Paul Mathisen (visual artist): “Being an artist is the first thing.” — Helen Frankenthaler

Paul is a multi-disciplinary visual artist who works in both pottery/ceramics and paint/canvas. He has exhibited at the State of the Art Gallery on State Street in downtown Sarasota and in the Community Gallery at the Ringling Museum of Art as well as at The Academy at Glengary.

His work, which is typically abstract, is also featured in several private collections. His goal is to create works that, rather than confuse or perplex the viewer, bring a sense of serenity, peacefulness and contentedness.

For the past eight years, Paul has worked in the Facilities Department at the Palmer Ranch branch of the YMCA of Southwest Florida. His job involves maintenance, repair and ordering inventory. He has been a participant in every iteration of the FACEing Mental Illness project.

Leymis Bolaños Wilmott (choreographer/dancer): Leymis is a Cuban-American artist, mother, and teacher with rhythm inextricably in her bones, found her voice through dance at an early age. As the Founder and Artistic Director of Sarasota Contemporary Dance and Instructor of Dance/Artist-in-Residence at New College of Florida, she has the privilege of using those bones to create art and be an influential member of Florida’s dance community. Leymis has been featured in Sarasota Magazine’s Arts & Cultural Issue: Ladies of the Arts, Top 28 Most Powerful People in the Arts, and most recently SRQ Magazine’s February 2021 cover story. Leymis pioneered the Dance and Healing certificate at the University of Florida and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Performance and Choreography from Florida State University.

Carrie Seidman (dancer): Carrie, the founder of the FACEing Mental Illness project, is a career-long newspaper journalist and a life-long dancer, who began taking ballet lessons at age 5. Dance was her earliest passion and has been the most enduring. She has owned a ballet studio, taught ballet and ballroom dance and served as a dance critic for several newspapers.

As a shy and introverted child, dance served as a means of non-verbal expression for Carrie. Throughout her life it has helped her deal with chronic anxiety and depression.

Upon arriving in Sarasota in 2010, one of the first people Carrie met was Leymis. The two friends have talked for years about working on a collaboration together. “creAtypical” is the culmination of that long-awaited goal and their shared desire to highlight the creative gifts of artists of all mindsets and abilities and the healing nature of creative pursuits.

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“creAtypical” will have two performances, at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., in the Sarasota Contemporary Dance in-studio, black box theatre on Saturday, April 26, 2025. There will also be an invitation-only performance on Friday, April 25 reserved for mental health professionals and clinicians, art therapists and/or anyone who works with a neurodivergent population. (We plan to make a video of the performance available to those out-of-towners who are unable to attend in person.)

All performances will be followed by a “talk-back” with the artists, who will discuss this collaboration, their individual creative processes and how their art serves as therapy for their mental wellbeing. Audience members are encouraged to participate in this informal exchange.

Thanks to the generous support of the Singer-Johnson Education Foundation, all of these performances are offered completely free of charge. However, space is limited. If you are interested in attending, please email, call or text Carrie at carrie.seidman@gmail.com or 505-238-0392 to reserve your spot; tickets are first-come, first served. Please indicate which performance you wish to attend, how many are in your party and provide a phone number and/or email address for contact.

If you know someone else you think might be interested in attending, please forward this email to them.

Thank you for supporting the FACEing Mental Illness project and the efforts of this wonderful group of talented artists!