Biography

E Hollinshead Stead (1984) came from nowhere. She grew up in a blue collar family in Union Township in rural Effingham County, Illinois. She has spent most of her adult life in Dallas, Texas. She holds a BS in Fashion Design and Merchandising from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her education includes years of living and working in bars, a career as a struggling fashion and lingerie model, a ten year career in the video game development industry, and everything she learned serving Grand Slam breakfasts to drunks at 3am.

Her work wanders over a range of techniques, mediums, and tones, but she is always telling stories. Her perspective is heavily influenced by her journey through the unspoken American social classes. Class, and the distance between our true identities and who we are willing to be to get what we need are often subtexts of her work. Whether working in video, combining painting and print making, or imitating the dead art of magazine paste-up, the stories she tells are fiercely auto-biographical. She arrogantly believes that she knows something that you can’t see.