Shelli Hoppe

Community Healthcare Research Associate | Creative Director | Artist | UX Designer | Expert Educator | Guest Speaker/Lecturer | Counterterrorism Consultant | Disability Justice Activist | Expatriate | Expert Witness | Peach Mango Salsa Taste Tester | Into Martinis | Likes Kindness | Dislikes Monkeys | Has Her Reasons | Headed to Bogota and the Arctic Circle in 2025 | Has Lived in 7 Countries | Speaks Very Bad Versions of Seven Languages | Terrified of Monkeys | Is Now Thinking About All the Times She Has Been Attacked by Monkeys | Four

Hello (from all over the) World!

Fancy meeting you here alone on the interwebs on a Wednesday afternoon while your most favorite coworker (me!) sends you GIFs about camels and humps.

You might be wondering, Who is this technicolor evil Disney Queen? Why so ROYGBIV? Ah, so. Much. Rice! Am I speaking with the newest, hottest Japanese AI? Not yet, but a designer can dream—I’m Shelli Hoppe. I’m a Puerto Rican woman who grew up on the island of Okinawa, Japan. I used to perform as as singer and dancer for Walt Disney World.

I have 10 years of professional, skills-based experience in strategy, copywriting and research. I have 2 years of design chops in Figma and Adobe Suite.

I’m almost done with my MPS in UX Design at Maryland Institute College of Art. I’m taking a gap year to spearhead a grant-funded healthcare project through the University of Iowa and Iowa Community Core. I am finishing up an MA in TESOL at Middlebury Institute, too, and earning an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson. I am also completing my studies as a research associate in Transdisciplinary Studies with The New Centre for Research and Practice. Very long ago, I majored in English and minored in dance at Brigham Young University.

My written work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Donna Kaz, and Brian Doyle. I’ve published in The Massachusetts Review, Saw Palm, South 85 Journal, and Tilted House, among others. My visual artwork has been shown and collected for about ten years and been praised by Mo Salemy, Fred Moten, Laura Harris, Pamela Sneed, and Gregg Bordowitz. (All heroes of mine.)

I have been awarded residencies, fellowships, and scholarships from Omega Institute, Spitsbergen Artist Residency, Artesumepaz Artist Residency, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Catapult.

My intersectional and interdisciplinary work plays with humor, neuroscience research, behavioral health movements across artistic disciplines, Western/Eastern literary theories, and violence de-escalation. I am interested in our naive notions of the innocence of origin, affect theory in relationship to political movements across international borders, modern computing and botany, counterterrorism’s legacy, and the origin of AI and associative thinking patterns in autistic children.

My aesthetic choices are at deliberate odds with the aesthetics of cruelty. I practice play as a healing art, and joy as an invitation. I do all this with reverence and hope that I can move toward grace. Most of all, all my work exists in a collectivist conversation with its audience. My question of our shared America, my forever homeland, is this: Is “defiance” the pejorative of difference?