One could argue Janeil Engelstad is all purpose, but that would underrate her contributions to the world. 

Janeil is creative, dedicated and deeply caring. She uses art and science everyday to create new networks, care for the environment, help different communities, and create new ways of interacting with the world around us.

In 2010 she founded Make Art with Purpose (MAP) as a platform for international artists using art as a tool to raise awareness for environmental and social themes and create solutions. 

MAP currently has 18 projects in place globally, with a handful of them born out of art-science collaborations both in the U.S. and in teams working internationally. At the Art + Science Rendezvous at UNT, Janeil spoke to the audience about current projects engaging themes in technology, ecology, environmentalism, interdisciplinary collaboration, and social ethics.

“New Geographies” explores the creative capability of social media. The project takes college and high school students from Seattle, Dallas, Central Europe, and Johannesburg and has them meet, discover, and create on different social media platforms. The main goal of the project is to take popular social media sites such as Tumblr, Instagram, or Twitter and observe how the students take the medium and transform it into a creative space. The students have no limitations on their creative abilities, the final output may be a physical installation or a new virtual space born in this “new geography.” The project will be presented at the end of October at the 50th anniversary of 9 Evenings in Seattle, Washington, which is an art, science, and technology festival celebrating technology mediated art.   

Serving the World Community

“Rivers, Lakes, and Streams” fed into a broad environmental theme in Engelstad’s talk and provided the working title of her latest international water project. The project has sites throughout the world including in Taipei, Taiwan where Engelstad will travel in 2017 to work with Bamboo Curtain. The Taiwan based initiative creates community art projects to promote environmental sustainability and awareness. Read more here. MAP’s contribution in Taipei will be replicating GREENMEME’s River Liver project. A River Liver, first created in 2005 in the Los Angeles River, is a sculpture embedded with local plants that over time help restore polluted bodies of water.

Engelstad also works with artists and scientists creating nano-particle based cancer drugs to project images on artificially grown cancerous tissues, planting different plots of plants to aid in species migration, and planning conservation projects in different water sources.

You can learn more about Janeil at http://www.janeilengelstad.net/.320.html

To keep up with Janeil and MAP follow @makeartwpurpose on Twitter!