CREATRIX

HWIC

Rachel Strickland

Rachel Strickland is an interdisciplinary performance artist, writer, creative mentor, and second generation witch (that we know of).  

Classically trained in ballet since the age of three, she studied creative writing and contemporary dance at UNC Asheville, going on to study belly dance, West African dance, and butoh.  Rachel began her bootstraps study of circus arts in 2007 while supporting herself as a dancer in several local fusion companies in San Francisco, moving to Seattle to cut her teeth on underground stages and national tours.  She developed a unique style and innovative approach to aerial hoop which brought her international recognition, and she has coached, performed, and choreographed on four continents. 

Her performance work combines aerial, dance, storytelling, and spectacle to create original works for stage and installation. To unearth aspects of the self which are buried, suppressed, and mutilated by the sanction of outside influences is both her subject matter and the intended effect on the viewer.  

As a creative mentor, she’s been called “the patron saint of ambitious creatives”, a “creative midwife”, and her personal favorite, “mother of monsters.”  Rachel has been mentoring artists to unearth sustainable, authentic creative practices since 2014 and has personally mentored over 400 artists in a 1:1 capacity.

She is passionate about the reclamation of autonomic personal agency, the rejection of hyper-independence, and the brave, bold creation of whatever the fuck you want to create.  She is absolutely certain that the intersection of magic and art is her place to do that work from.

She’s made her home in the swamps of coastal South Carolina where the pulse of the land inspires both her artwork and her teachings. 

Guest teacher

Amber Lackey

Amber is an Ecdysiast witch. A performer, dancer, teacher, and devotee of the erotic. Pleasure is her pathway.

Through movement, magic, and storytelling, she explores the depths of vulnerability. Her work is an invitation to step into intimacy with the hidden, the uncomfortable, and the deeply human, to discover that our most exposed places are often where our greatest beauty, power, and liberation reside.

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Amber brings her practice of Sensual Somatic Alchemy to Creatrix for all to enjoy.

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Guest teacher

Meg Angela

Meg Angela is an intuitive channel, rebel mother, artist and mystic - a Southern California native currently living and creating in Charleston, South Carolina. She is the founder of Phases Intuitive Wellness, a space where nutrition, intuition, pleasure, and ancestral wisdom coalesce.

Meg has experience in disordered eating patterns, body dysmorphia and interoceptive nutrition. With degrees and licensure in Nutrition & Dietetics, Anthropology, and Cosmetology, she brings a unique blend of nutritional and cultural sciences and mysticism to the ancestral and emotional stories we carry around food and the body. She facilitates women through deep exploration, chakra alignment, self-expression, and body awareness as an invitation for the feminine to question the rules they’ve inherited and to reconnect with the wisdom held within.

Meg Angela explores food as more than nourishment—it is ritual, pleasure, connection, creativity, and a pathway back to the Self. Within Tantric Eating, Meg guides women into a more sensual and intuitive relationship with food, helping them slow down, awaken their senses, cultivate presence, and experience nourishment as an act of self-devotion.

Through her burlesque persona, Ophelia Gushing, she invokes the body as canvas, pleasure as practice, and sensuality as a form of body devotion. Her artistry flows through her in the forms of performance, pigment, pabulum, pottery, photography, and all mediums inclined to solicit her.

At the heart of her work is a simple invitation:
Let nourishment become pleasure, trust your intuition, and reclaim your body as sovereign.

Meg Angela brings her Tantric Eating & Alchemy workshop to Creatrix for all to experience a moment of satisfaction.

Guest Teacher

Shannon Marie Carmody

Shannon Marie Carmody is an actor, singer and voiceover artist based in Charleston, SC. With degrees in Psychology and Acting, her psychology background explores the emotional landscape of the characters, with theatre and vocal training breathes the characters to life. After suffering from a vocal injury, she learned how to heal her voice with doctors and coaching but didn't regain her vocal power until the spiritual component was recognized. Studying the energetics of voice led her to accidentally getting breath work certified which is now part of her daily devotion. Today Shannon uses her voice full time for animation, audiobooks, national commercial campaigns, and *spicy* audiobooks (where she performs as Sheshe Lagoon.) Her other passions include worshipping the ocean, studying all things esoteric, a good candelabra, and her tuxedo cats- Kobe and Chiron. 

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Shannon brings her proprietary workshop From Coo to Concert Hall: Don't Sleep on the Power of Your Voice to Creatrix.

Guest Liaison

Kim Melohn

Kim is a multi-disciplinary circus performer and coach with a specialty in making gravity her bitch. She chooses to triumph over that overwhelming force via contortion and vertical apprarati. Ever since she learned how to climb fabric, in 2014, she has hardly been able to come out of the air. While living in the Chicago suburbs, Aloft Circus Arts was her circus home. There she worked with aerial and flexibility coaches: Hayley Larson, Natalie Abel, and Julie Marshall. In 2021 she started training full time at the renowned New England Center for Circus Arts, where she switched her focus to contortion under the guidance of Stephanie Abrams.

As an adult sized child, Kim just wants to have fun and do cool stuff! To her that means big dynamic movements, death defying drops, intricate wraps, and splits for claps (ha that rhymes)! She enjoys creating high energy acts with a lot of personality and a healthy helping of corny humor.

When this bendy babe doesn’t have her feet over her head, she enjoys spending time at home with her husband and their dogs. Their activities include but are not limited to eating food, watching reruns, and “attempting photosynthesis.”

Kitchen Magician

Lexa Walsh

Lexa Walsh has been curating and creating dining experiences for over 25 years. She has been both a personal chef and on-site catering chef for Bay Area companies such as Paula LeDuc Fine Catering and Events, Left Coast Catering, The Heirloom Chef and Grace Street Catering. Her favorite work is feeding fellow artists at artist residencies such as Atlantic Center for the Arts, where she has been Culinary Artist in Residence since 2014, and Found Sound Nation, where she's been accommodating hungry international musicians since 2015. She manages a commercial kitchen, plans, shops, and executes daily meals for 25-40 international guests during residency periods. She accommodates many different dietary restrictions and cultural traditions, and incorporates radical hospitality into her meal presentations. 

Chef Lexa, the youngest of fifteen children, did not learn to cook from her sweet mom. Instead, she found herself as both a server and a chef at a Brooklyn cafe in college before relocating to the Bay Area’s culinary splendor. Her real training took place in the Czech Republic where she co-ran the kitchen at the international art center CESTA from 1996-2004, feeding up to 100 artists at a time.

When she’s not in the kitchen, she’s making large scale participatory art installations and ceramics.  You can read more about Lexa's art here.

Guest Artist Photographer

Max Cooper

Max Cooper is a photographer and #FatSuburbanWildernessHero working and adventuring in North Carolina's western mountains. A former photojournalist disillusioned by our latter-day abandonment of truth and good taste, he set out to capture the Appalachians with a wooden camera and a pocket full of film. He has not yet succeeded. But he has caught a lot of wild trout, gotten very dirty, made a handful of memorable photos, and discovered that truth persists without regard for photojournalists.

He's been doing this a long time, won some awards no one's heard of, published work in outlets that have mostly gone out of business, and worked for some big companies and politicians that hire him in spite of the dirt under his nails. He also smokes a pipe and ties his own flies, and he's very frustrated that the haunting stillness of the mountains still eludes him.